The submission details a sharp decline in media freedom in Georgia since the last review in 2021, as well as an ongoing crackdown on journalists and their newsrooms that appears designed to muzzle independent reporting.

Georgia, previously regarded as a democratic forerunner in post-Soviet Eurasia, is taking an authoritarian turn under the ruling Georgian Dream party, with mass protests against the country’s suspension of its European Union (EU) accession talks.

CPJ identified the following key areas of concern:

• Jailing of journalists on politically motivated charges. This includes the unwarranted pre-trial detention and trial of media manager Mzia Amaglobeli, who faces up to seven years in prison on charges widely condemned as excessive and retaliatory. A verdict is expected on August 1.

• Numerous large-scale incidents of apparently organized violence against journalists, particularly by law enforcement officers. For example, on July 5, 2021, more than 50 journalists covering a LGBTQ+ pride event in the capital Tbilisi were attacked by anti-LGBTQ+ protesters.

Between November 28, 2024, and May 1, 2025, rights organizations documented 145 incidents of attacks and other violations against 193 journalists reporting on protests against the suspension of EU accession talks, mostly by police. No police officers have yet been held accountable.

• The enactment of a raft of repressive laws targeting independent media.

These include:

-A 2024 “foreign agent” law and even harsher 2025 Foreign Agents Registration Act, with penalties of up to five years in prison;

-Amendments to the broadcasting law expanding the parliament-appointed regulator’s power to fine broadcasters and suspend their licenses;Amendments to the law on grants, requiring foreign donors to obtain government permission for grants. This adversely impacts online news outlets in particular, given their heavy reliance on foreign funding to ensure editorial independence;A “family values” law banning broadcasters from reporting on LGBTQ+ issues;

-Amendments to free speech laws abolishing key protections and facilitating defamation suits against the press.

–At least 16 foreign journalists have been denied entry since 2022. These denials appear to be in retaliation for critical reporting or views that conflict with Georgian Dream priorities.

–A significant increase in defamation lawsuits brought by politically influential individuals against critical media and journalists, with more than 40 such cases since 2021. These lawsuits, often referred to as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs), aim to silence journalists.

–A sharp deterioration in access to public information and institutions. For example, in 2023 new regulations restricted journalists’ rights to film and conduct interviews in Parliament and granted Parliament the power to suspend their accreditation for violations. Since then, at least 15 journalists have had their accreditation suspended, all from critical media outlets.

–A marked rise in disinformation and hate speech.

Read the full 18-page report here.

Please send press inquiries to press@cpj.org.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

On June 22, American warplanes crossed into Iranian airspace and dropped 14 massive bombs.

The attack was not in response to a provocation; it came on the heels of illegal Israeli aggression that took the lives of more than 600 Iranians.

This was a return to something familiar and well-practised: an empire bombing innocents across the orientalist abstraction called “the Middle East”.

• READ MORE: Eugene Doyle: Why Asia-Pacific should be cheering for Iran and not US bomb-based statecraft
• Other Israeli war on Middle East reports

That night, US President Donald Trump, flanked by his vice-president and two state secretaries, told the world: “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace”.

There is something chilling about how bombs are baptised with the language of diplomacy and how destruction is dressed in the garments of stability. To call that peace is not merely a misnomer; it is a criminal distortion.

But what is peace in this world, if not submission to the West? And what is diplomacy, if not the insistence that the attacked plead with their attackers?

In the 12 days that Israel’s illegal assault on Iran lasted, images of Iranian children pulled from the wreckage remained absent from the front pages of Western media. In their place were lengthy features about Israelis hiding in fortified bunkers.

Victimhood serving narrative
Western media, fluent in the language of erasure, broadcasts only the victimhood that serves the war narrative.

And that is not just in its coverage of Iran. For 20 months now, the people of Gaza have been starved and incinerated. By the official count, more than 55,000 lives have been taken; realistic estimates put the number at hundreds of thousands.

Every hospital in Gaza has been bombed. Most schools have been attacked and destroyed.

Leading human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have already declared that Israel is committing genocide, and yet, most Western media would not utter that word and would add elaborate caveats when someone does dare say it live on TV.

Presenters and editors would do anything but recognise Israel’s unending violence in an active voice.

Despite detailed evidence of war crimes, the Israeli military has faced no media censure, no criticism or scrutiny. Its generals hold war meetings near civilian buildings, and yet, there are no media cries of Israelis being used as “human shields”.

Israeli army and government officials are regularly caught lying or making genocidal statements, and yet, their words are still reported as “the truth”.

Bias over Palestinian deaths
A recent study found that on the BBC, Israeli deaths received 33 times more coverage per fatality than Palestinian deaths, despite Palestinians dying at a rate of 34 to 1 compared with Israelis. Such bias is no exception, it is the rule for Western media.

Like Palestine, Iran is described in carefully chosen language. Iran is never framed as a nation, only as a regime. Iran is not a government, but a threat — not a people, but a problem.

The word “Islamic” is affixed to it like a slur in every report. This is instrumental in quietly signalling that Muslim resistance to Western domination must be extinguished.

Iran does not possess nuclear weapons; Israel and the United States do. And yet only Iran is cast as an existential threat to world order.

Because the problem is not what Iran holds, but what it refuses to surrender. It has survived coups, sanctions, assassinations, and sabotage. It has outlived every attempt to starve, coerce, or isolate it into submission.

It is a state that, despite the violence hurled at it, has not yet been broken.

And so the myth of the threat of weapons of mass destruction becomes indispensable. It is the same myth that was used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. For three decades, American headlines have whispered that Iran is just “weeks away” from the bomb, three decades of deadlines that never arrive, of predictions that never materialise.

Fear over false ‘nuclear threat’
But fear, even when unfounded, is useful. If you can keep people afraid, you can keep them quiet. Say “nuclear threat” often enough, and no one will think to ask about the children killed in the name of “keeping the world safe”.

This is the modus operandi of Western media: a media architecture not built to illuminate truth, but to manufacture permission for violence, to dress state aggression in technical language and animated graphics, to anaesthetise the public with euphemisms.

Time Magazine does not write about the crushed bones of innocents under the rubble in Tehran or Rafah, it writes about “The New Middle East” with a cover strikingly similar to the one it used to propagandise regime change in Iraq 22 years ago.

But this is not 2003. After decades of war, and livestreamed genocide, most Americans no longer buy into the old slogans and distortions. When Israel attacked Iran, a poll showed that only 16 percent of US respondents supported the US joining the war.

After Trump ordered the air strikes, another poll confirmed this resistance to manufactured consent: only 36 percent of respondents supported the move, and only 32 percent supported continuing the bombardment

The failure to manufacture consent for war with Iran reveals a profound shift in the American consciousness. Americans remember the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that left hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis dead and an entire region in flames. They remember the lies about weapons of mass destruction and democracy and the result: the thousands of American soldiers dead and the tens of thousands maimed.

They remember the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan after 20 years of war and the never-ending bloody entanglement in Iraq.

Low social justice spending
At home, Americans are told there is no money for housing, healthcare, or education, but there is always money for bombs, for foreign occupations, for further militarisation. More than 700,000 Americans are homeless, more than 40 million live under the official poverty line and more than 27 million have no health insurance.

And yet, the US government maintains by far the highest defence budget in the world.

Americans know the precarity they face at home, but they are also increasingly aware of the impact US imperial adventurism has abroad. For 20 months now, they have watched a US-sponsored genocide broadcast live.

They have seen countless times on their phones bloodied Palestinian children pulled from rubble while mainstream media insists, this is Israeli “self-defence”.

The old alchemy of dehumanising victims to excuse their murder has lost its power. The digital age has shattered the monopoly on narrative that once made distant wars feel abstract and necessary. Americans are now increasingly refusing to be moved by the familiar war drumbeat.

The growing fractures in public consent have not gone unnoticed in Washington. Trump, ever the opportunist, understands that the American public has no appetite for another war.

‘Don’t drop bombs’
And so, on June 24, he took to social media to announce, “the ceasefire is in effect”, telling Israel to “DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS,” after the Israeli army continued to attack Iran.

Trump, like so many in the US and Israeli political elites, wants to call himself a peacemaker while waging war. To leaders like him, peace has come to mean something altogether different: the unimpeded freedom to commit genocide and other atrocities while the world watches on.

But they have failed to manufacture our consent. We know what peace is, and it does not come dressed in war. It is not dropped from the sky.

Peace can only be achieved where there is freedom. And no matter how many times they strike, the people remain, from Palestine to Iran — unbroken, unbought, and unwilling to kneel to terror.

Ahmad Ibsais is a first-generation Palestinian American and law student who writes the newsletter State of Siege.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dan Lieberman.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Allen Forrest.

Summary of Part I

In Part I, I argued that the relationship between political subordination and revolution is ill-conceived if framed in a dualistic way. We are either totally submissive or at the other extreme there is revolution. However, following the work of James C. Scott’s great book Domination and the Arts of Resistance I claimed that people don’t go from being subordinate to wanting to overthrow a government overnight. There is a spectrum of growing dissatisfaction in between. I presented three in between stages: thick submission, thin submission and paper-thin submission. Then I presented Scott’s three-dimensional theory of subordination: a) material, economic and technological; b) social-psychological; and c) cultural. I included examples in each dimension. Then I described three movements from submission to revolution. The first is the “public transcript” controlled by elites; second is a hidden transcript controlled by subordinates and the third is a public transcript controlled by subordinates on their way to becoming insubordinate. In Part I I covered the public transcript controlled by elites. These included parades and coronations, control of public discourse and use of language. They include body language, gestures and postures. In this second part I will describe what hidden transcripts are like and lastly, I will explain the process by which the hidden transcripts become public and controlled by the lower classes.

*****

The Hidden Transcript for Resistance

The hidden transcript requires two performances: a) performance of correct speech acts and gestures; and b) control of rage, insult, anger and violence in the face of the ruler’s appropriation of labor, public humiliations, whippings, rapes, slaps, leers, contempt, ritual denigration, and abuse of the children of the oppressed. When the public transcript is disrupted, it is difficult for the true feelings of subordinates not to surface. For example, in the twentieth century, the sinking of the Titanic was such an event. The drowning of large numbers of wealthy and powerful whites in their finery aboard a ship that was said to be unsinkable seemed like a stroke of poetic justice to many blacks. Here is a verse that was turned into a song:

All the millionaires looked around at Shine (a black stoker) say

“Now Shine, oh Shine, save poor me.” Say “We’ll make you wealthier than Shine can be”. Shine say, “you hate my color and you hate my race”

Say, “Jump overboard and give those sharks a chase”

Another example is the boxing victory of Jack Johnson over Jim Jeffries in 1910 and Joe Louis’ victories later in the 20th century. These were instances where black men took out their revenge on all whites for a lifetime of indignities. This was so disturbing to the local and state authorities that they passed ordinances against these victories being shown in local theaters.

But in order for hidden transcripts to take root, they need to be rehearsed backstage. Here is an example of a hidden transcript of slaves talking to each other after the master had left the kitchen:

That’s a day a-comin! That’s a day a comin’! I hear the rumbling ob de chariots! I see de flashin ob de guns! White folks blood is a runnin on the ground like a ribber, an de deads heaped up dat high! Oh Lor! Hasten de day when de blows, a de bruises, and de aches and de pains, shall come to de white folks, an de buzzards shall eat dem as dey’s dead in the streets. Oh Lor! roll on de chariots, an gib the black people rest and peace. Oh Lor! Gib me de pleasure ob livin’ till dat day, when I shall see white folks shot down like de wolves when dey come hungry out o’de woods. (5)

There are 4 characteristics of hidden transcript which merit clarification:

1. The hidden transcript is specific to a given social site and to a particular set of actors. It happens among a restricted public. A slave speaking with a white shopkeeper during the day is not the same way he would speak in encountering whites on horseback at night.
2. The frontier between the public and the hidden is a zone of constant struggle. For example in medieval Europe if a woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would spit beetle juice over her dress.
3. Dominant groups also have hidden transcripts, but this is not the subject of Scott’s work.
4. The hidden transcripts of dominant and subordinate are never in direct contact with each other except in rebellious situations, as we shall see.

Scott develops an interesting spectrum of the range of possible reactions that slaves might express. It seems reasonable that this could also apply to serfs and untouchables. I’ve reorganized Scott’s spectrum so that it conforms with the traditional political spectrum. At the most extreme, right wing of the spectrum of subordination are the performances for a harsh overseer. This requires the most work. The responses to a more liberal lord or overseer is next on the spectrum and last and least demanding of public transcripts are the performances of whites who have no direct authority over slaves, but who still have privileges. The last four parts of the spectrum are the hidden transcripts, moving from sympathetic to the most trusted.

Confiding in other slaves and free blacks in general is certainly more direct than with any whites. More intimate still are the conversations had between slaves of the same master. Next is trustworthiness of one’s closest slave friends. Lastly are those with whom one can be most confidential – the immediate family of slaves.

Spectrum of Hidden and Public Transcript

Hidden Transcript                            Public transcript
dominant

For members of the same subordinate group

Hidden transcript will be least inhibited when two conditions are fulfilled:

• When it is voiced in a sequestered social site where control, surveillance and repression are the least able to reach. This is where they can talk freely.
• When this milieu is composed entirely of close confidants who share with each other similar experiences of domination (in-common subordination).

The first condition is to have a place to discuss, fantasize, plot and scheme and the second is to have something to talk about.

Need for social spaces for the hidden transcript

Slaves made use of secluded woods, clearing gullies, thickets and ravines to meet and talk in safety. In quarters at night, slaves hung up quilts and rags to muffle the sound. They gathered in circles on their knees and whispered with a guard to watch for the authorities. English historian Christopher Hill points out that the heretical movement, the Lollards, was most rife in pastoral forest, moorland and fen areas where social control of the church did not effectively penetrate. Familists, Ranters and Levellers thrived best in those areas where surveillance was least – the pastoral, moorland and forest areas with few squires or clergy. In European culture, the alehouse, tavern, inn and cabaret were seen by secular authorities and by the church as places of subversion. But what do you do if no site is available? Resistance is rawer when showing itself in linguistic codes, dialects, gestures.

Social spaces are not empty, neutral areas where subordinate groups simply slip into. Social spaces are an achievement of resistance – won and defended in the teeth of domination. Scott emphasizes the importance of having someone to share your perspective with in order to keep resistance alive. He refers to the social psychological Asch experiment. People are very likely to doubt their individually formulated perceptions of a line if enough people volunteer different perceptions. However, with even a minority of support for the individual’s perception, they are likely to stick with their original perception.

Are there subordinate groups that are more likely to stick together than others? Scott argues that among working class men some types of work are more likely to produce solidarity than others. These exist when a social group lacks mobility outside of their trade; there are high levels of cooperation necessary to do a job; there is high level of physical danger involved In the work; and workers are geographically isolated from other workers. That group is the most likely to be militant. What kind of workers are these? They are miners, merchant seamen, lumberjacks and longshoremen.

Conversely, in subordinate positions where there is likely to be an upward mobility built into the job: when the work involves contact with many other workers doing other jobs; the work does not require a great deal of cooperation and the occupation is not dangerous.  Those subordinate groups are not likely to build social solidarity.

Furthermore, the lower classes have horizontal mechanisms for controlling defection. These are not pretty and include slander, character assassination, gossip, rumor, public gestures of contempt, shunning, curses, backbiting, and out-casting. Anger will be disciplined by the shared experiences and power relations within that small group, ranging from raw anger to cooked indignation. Sentiments that are idiosyncratic, unrepresentative of the group’s feelings have weak resonance and are likely to be selected against or censored. 

Striving to atomize individuals – the dominant at work

The best social institutions at isolating individuals are what have been called by Erving Goffman “total institutions.” Examples are Jesuits, monastic orders, political sects, and court bureaucracies which enact techniques to try to prevent the development of subordinate loyalties. Preventive atomization of caste, slaves and feudal societies includes the following:

1. The introduction of eunuchs into an organization to undermine the possibility of competing family loyalties.
2. Bringing together a labor force with the greatest linguistic and ethnic diversity.
3. Requiring that the subordinates all speak the language of the authorities.
4. Planting informers to create distrust among the subordinate groups.
5. Recruiting administrative staff from marginal, despised groups.
6. People who were isolated from the populace and entirely dependent on the rulers for status.

As these techniques are usually only partly successful, heavy-handed strategies follow like:

1. Severing autonomous circuits of folk discourse such as seizing broadsheets and printing presses.
2. Detaining singers and itinerant workers who might be passing on information.
3. Arresting and questioning anyone caught discussing the subversive topics in markets and inns.

In short, a form of domination creates certain possibilities for the production of a hidden transcript. Whether these possibilities are realized or not depends on the composition of the workers as well as on the constant agency of subordinates in seizing, defending and enlarging a spatial power field and resisting the techniques of atomization by the authorities.

Methodological problems with the hidden transcript

The problem with detecting the hidden transcript is not merely that the standard record is one of the records of elite activities and the ways that reflect their class and status rather than the lower classes. An even more important difficulty is that subordinate groups have an interest in concealing their activities and statements which might expose them. For example, we know little about the rate at which slaves in the US pilfered their masters’ livestock, grain and larder. If the slaves were successful, the master would know as little about this as possible. The goal of slaves is to escape detection.

Resistance through Disguise

Steeling for guerilla warfare

The upper classes sense the lower classes’ resistance which the dominant group interprets as cunning and deceptive. Both classes train themselves in maintaining their cool in the face of insults. Aristocrats are trained in self-restraints in the face of insults by competing aristocrats. Among blacks, “the Dozens” serves as a mechanism for teaching and sharpening the ability of oppressed groups to control anger by deliberately taunting each other with the most personal, family-related and interpersonal insults without blowing up. This is training for dealing with the insensitivity and obliviousness of white racism.

Elementary forms of disguise

Elementary forms of disguise can be divided into types. In one, the message is clear but the messenger is ambiguous. In spirit possession, gossip, witchcraft, rumor, letters and mass defiance, the message is hostility to the authorities but no one can locate the messenger.

In the second type, the messenger is clear but it is their message that is ambiguous. Euphemisms and grumbling and words with double meaning allow the lower classes to communicate dissatisfaction without taking full responsibility for it. If they get “called” on their message, they retreat to the public transcript meaning of what is literally being said.

Disguising the messenger

One form of elementary disguised resistance is possession states. Unlike vision quests which are actively engaged in by egalitarian hunting and gathering societies, possession states are altered states which are more of a reaction. As I.M. Lewis writes, possession states are a covert form of social protest for women and for marginal oppressed groups where they can openly make grievances known. They can curse the authorities and make demands they would never dare to make under non-altered states. The incidence of actual afflictions laid at door of these spirits tends to coincide with episodes of tension and unjust treatment in relations between master and servant.

Two other forms of anonymity are rumor and gossip. Gossip is a way in which the lower classes may comment on the everyday affairs of a lord, slave master or brahman for the purpose of ruining their reputation. Witchcraft is a step beyond gossip. It turns spiteful words about another into secret aggression acts of magic against the authorities. Sorcery is a classic resort by vulnerable subordinate groups who have little or no safe open opportunity to challenge a form of domination that angers them.

Unlike gossip, rumor is a reaction, not to everyday events but to events that are vitally important and about which only partial information is available. Rumors elaborate, distort and exaggerate the information which is given in which oppressed groups can interpret their hopes for the situation they are in.

On the other hand, mass defiance requires effective coordination. These are informal networks of the community that join members of subordinate groups through kinship, labor exchanges, neighborhood and ritual practices. After the State socialist declaration of martial law in Poland in 1983 against the formation of the Solidarity trade union:

Supporters of the union in the city of Lodz developed a unique form of cautious protest. They decided that in order to demonstrate their disdain for the lies propagated by the official government television news, they would all take a daily promenade timed to coincide exactly with the broadcast, wearing their hats backwards. Soon, much of the town joined them.

There was a sequel to this episode when the authorities shifted the hours of the Lodz ghetto curfew so that a promenade at that hour became illegal. In response, for some time many Lodz residents took their televisions to the window at precisely the time the government newscast began and beamed them out at full volume into empty courtyards and streets. A passerby who, in this case would have had to have been an officer of the “security forces”, was greeted by the eerie sight of working-class housing flats with a television at nearly every window blaring the government’s message at him. (140)

Even in prisons without the relative freedom of neighborhood connections, kinship, labor exchanges or the opportunity for collective rituals, prisoners demonstrate mass defiance when they rhythmically beat meal tins or rap on the bars of their cells. Scott describes a more elaborate form of mass defiance that prisoners used against guards in reaction to an up-and-coming race between the two:

The prisoners, knowing that they were expected to lose, spoiled the performance by purposely losing while acting an elaborate pantomime of excess effort. By exaggerating their compliance to the point of mockery, they openly showed their contempt for the proceedings while making it difficult for the guards to take action against them. (139)

Disguising the message

It is easy to think that if anonymity is not possible, complete deference is the only option. But, as Scott says, if anonymity encourages unvarnished messages, the veiling of the message represents the application of varnish. At its best, euphemisms are code phrases to protect the frank description of things that are too personal to speak about in public. However, as we saw, euphemisms are used by the upper classes to mask what they are really up to. The lower classes can also exploit the use of euphemisms. The oppressed can disguise a message just enough to skirt retaliation. However, euphemisms are not just phases that can have double or triple meaning. They can take place when people do not change the words at all but say them in the wrong place at the wrong time. Scott retells a more in-your-face use of this.

Slaves in Georgetown, South Carolina apparently crossed that linguistic boundary when they were arrested for singing the following hymn at the beginning of the civil war:

we’ll soon be free (repeated three times)
When the Lord will call us home
My bruddeer, how long (repeated three times)
Fore we done suffering here?
It won’t be long (repeated three times)
For the Lord call us home
We’ll soon be free (repeated three times)
When Jesus sets me free
We’ll fight for liberty (repeated three times)
When the Lord will call us home.

In another time and place, the same song could be interpreted by slave masters as the slaves pining for an ideal afterlife, rather than justice in this one. Grumblings are a groan, a sigh, a moan, chuckle, a well-timed silence, or a wink. Like euphemisms, grumbling must walk the line between being too cryptic, when the antagonist fails to get the point, but not so blatant that the bearers risk open retaliation.

Elaborate forms of disguise: collective representations of culture

Elaborate forms of disguise tend to be more “built-in” to a subculture and less spontaneous.  These include dance, dress, drama, folktales, religious beliefs and symbols which reverse the cultural domination of the elites. In oral countercultures, what is communicated is less precise than when communicated in writing. However, communication through face-to-face, whether voice, gestures, clothes, or dance, the communicator retains control over the manner of its dissemination. Anonymity is retained because each enactment is unique to time, place and audience. With writing, once a text is out of the author’s hands control over its use and dissemination is lost.

Myths

In sacred ceremonies managed by elites, slaves were expected to control their gestures, facial expressions and voices. Dancing, shouting, clapping and participation countered the elites’ attempts to make a coronation out of a religious ceremony. Just as the lower classes were expected to be passive in public secular activities, they were also expected to sit still and keep their mouths shut in sacred contexts. But in their own clandestine services, slaves did the opposite.

This form of disguise also played itself out in the choice of which myths to emphasize. African slaves chose deliverance and redemption themes: Moses in the Promised Land, along with the Egyptian captivity and emancipation. The Land of Canaan was taken to mean the Northern United States and freedom. Conservative preachers emphasized the New Testament with meekness, turning the other cheek, walking the extra mile. Needless to say they were unpopular with slaves. On some occasions, slaves walked out of these services.

In the cultural conflicts that preceded the German Peasants’ War on the eve of the Reformation, there was a struggle over a pilgrimage site associated with the “Drummer of Niklashausen”. This tradition held that Christ’s sacrifice had redeemed all of humankind, including serfs. Access to salvation was democratically distributed. For a while, this church became a social magnet for pilgrimages and subversive discourse.

Folktales

In folktales, the trickster is a main player in folk resistance. Just as the lower classes can rarely stand toe-to-toe with the dominators, so the trickster, Brer Rabbit, makes his way through a treacherous environment of enemies by using wit and cunning. He knows the habits of his enemies and deceives them. North American slaves:

By identifying with Brer Rabbit, the slave child learned…that safety and success depended on curbing one’s anger and channeling it into forms of deception and cunning. (164)

Inverted imagery

There is a pan-European tradition of world-turned-up-side-down drawings and prints in which the hare snared the hunter, the cart pulled the horse, fishermen are pulled from the water by fish, a wife beats her husband, an ox slaughters the butcher, a goose puts the cook into the pot, and a king on foot is led by a peasant on horseback. Needless to say, this did not go over well with the authorities. In 1842 czarist officials seized all known copies of a large print depicting the ox slaughtering the butcher.

Rituals of Reversal, Carnival 

Much of the writing on carnival emphasizes the spirit of physical abandon – dancing, gluttony, open sexuality – as a reaction to Lent, which will follow carnival on the Catholic calendar. Michael Bakhtin argues that Carnival focused on functions we share with lower mammals, that is, the level at which we are all alike. But cutting the upper classes down to animals was only part of Carnival. Bakhtin also treats Carnival as the ritual location of uninhibited speech – the only place where undominated discourse prevailed – no servility, false pretenses, obsequiousness or etiquettes of submissiveness. It was a place where laughter with and at the upper classes was possible. For Bakhtin, laughter was revolutionary. Only equals may laugh together. Traditionally, the lower classes may not laugh in the presence of the upper classes. While the serf, slave and untouchable may have difficulty imagining other systems than serfdom, slavery and the caste system, they will have no trouble imagining a total reversal of an existing organization where they are on top, and the elites are on the bottom. This was also part of Carnival. These reversals can be found in nearly every major cultural tradition: Carnival in Catholic countries, Feast of Krishna in India, Saturnalia in ancient Rome, and the Water Festival in Buddhist Southeast Asia, to name a few.

Scott imagines carnival as a kind of people’s informal courtroom: the young can scold the old, women can ridicule men:

Any local notable who had incurred popular wrath, such as merciless usurers, soldiers who were abusive, corrupt local officials, priests who were abusive or lascivious – might find themselves a target… They might be burned in effigy.  (174)

In Andalusia in Spain, initially both classes participated in Carnival, but as agrarian conditions worsened, the landowners withdrew and watched Carnival from the balcony. They understood the reversals as getting uncomfortably close to the real thing.

Cultural reversals: hydraulic co-optations or rehearsal for revolution?

Fundamentalist Marxist theorists imagine that carnival is the invention of the elites. They also imagine that the effect of participating in these cultural traditions is to drain off energy that would be better utilized for making a revolution. Scott objects to both this claim and its analysis. If the first notion were true, elites would encourage Carnival. The opposite is more the case. Carnival was seen by the Church and state as a potential site for disorder and it required surveillance. In fact, the Church tried to replace Carnival with mystery plays. The proposal that elites create these rituals as hydraulic drainers confuses the intentions of elites with the limited results they are able to achieve. Rather, the existence and evolving form of Carnival is the outcome of social conflict, not the stage-managed concoction of elites.  Bread and circuses are political concessions won by subordinate classes. Carnival was the only time of the year the lower classes were permitted to assemble in unprecedented numbers behind masks and make threatening gestures. It was dangerous indeed!

Now to the issue of whether these cultural acts drain energy away from political action. Scott agrees with the hydraulic theory that systematic subordination elicits a reaction and this reaction involves a desire to strike or speak back. But the hydraulic theory supposes that the desire to strike back can be substantially satisfied in any of the cultural forms mentioned – myths, folktales, reversal imagery and rituals. For theories of hydraulic human interaction, the safe expression of aggression in joint fantasy yields as much or nearly as much satisfaction as direct aggression against the object of frustration. Scott argues against this.

Social psychological experimental studies of aggression today show that aggressive play and fantasy increase rather than decrease the likelihood of actual aggression. Additionally, many revolts by slaves, peasants and serfs occurred during seasonal rituals. The discourse of the hidden transcript is not a substitute for action. It merely sheds light on revolutionary action but it doesn’t explain it. Cultures of resistance help build the collective action itself.  The hidden transcript is a necessary but not sufficient condition for practical resistance. In response to Boudreau’s claim that conditioning from childhood socializes the lower classes to miss revolutionary opportunities, Scott argues it is equally important to be explained how working classes have imagined a sense of historical possibility which was not objectively justified, as the Lollards and Diggers of the English revolution found out.

From Resistance to Insubordination and Rebellion: When the hidden transcript goes public

How is it possible that so many people immediately understood what to do and that none of them needed any advice or instruction?

Apathy on the job

It is easy to overlook how much the indifference, lack of creativity on the job and low productivity levels can accumulate, not just in individual acts of frustration, but also in collective frustration that becomes a setting in which status infrapolitics builds up:

The aggregation of thousands upon thousands of petty acts of resistance has dramatic economic and political effects. Production, whether on the factory floor or on the plantation, can result in performances that are not bad enough to provoke punishment but not good enough to allow the enterprise to succeed. Petty acts can, like snowflakes on the steep mountainside, set off an avalanche. (192)

From this dissatisfaction on the job, the hidden transcript grows especially when for military, economic or political reasons, the elites have lost ground. As we saw in the argument against the hydraulic theory of inverted rituals, the rehearsal theory of Scott claims that aggression that is inhibited and may be displaced on other objects is rarely a substitute for direct confrontation with the frustrating agent. Repeated public humiliations can be fully reciprocated only with public revenge.

Defiance in public

In reaction to political, economic and religious downturns, the lower classes begin to become defiant in public. They begin wearing clothing not designated for their status such as turbans and shoes. They refuse to bow or give appropriate salutation.  A defiant posture can open acts of desacralization and disrespect. These are often the first sign of actual rebellion.

During the Spanish revolution of 1936 the revolutionary exhumations and desecration of sacred remains from Spanish cathedrals accomplished three purposes according to Scott:

• It partly satisfied the anticlerical population that had not earlier dared to defy the Church;
• It conveyed that the crowds were not afraid of spiritual or temporal power of the Church; and,
• It suggested to a large audience that anything is possible

As an historian of the English Civil War, Christopher Hill argues:

Each facet of the popular revolution unleashed and then crushed by Cromwell had its counterpart in low-profile popular culture long predating its public manifestation. Thus, the Diggers and the Levelers staked an open claim to a fundamentally different version of property rights. Their popularity and the force of their moral claim derived from an offstage popular culture that had never accepted the enclosures as just and found expression in the practices of poaching and tearing down fences.

Differentiating resistance from insubordination

There is a difference between accidental or disguised resistance and open insubordination or aggression. For example: the practical failure to comply is different from the declared public refusal to comply; bumping up against someone is different from openly pushing that person; pilfering resources is not the same as open seizure of goods; standing up and then failing to sing the national anthem is different from publicly sitting while others stand. In the forms of resistance, every act is separate. Insubordination calls into question many subordinate acts which, up until now, were taken for granted.

The last chapter of Scott’s book addresses two points about what happens when the hidden transcript becomes public, First, what is it like emotionally for the lower classes when hidden transcripts become public? He addresses how the first acts of defiance are mixed with fear on one hand and elation on the other. He also addresses how the presence of the hidden transcript explains the apparent gap between the docility of the lower classes during normal times and their rebellious collective acts which appear to come out of nowhere. How do the apparent isolated charismatic acts of individuals gain their social force by virtue of their roots in the hidden transcript of a subordinate group?

Emotional experience of going public with the hidden transcript

At the end of the American Civil War there was the open defiance of slaves. There were instances of insolence, vituperation and attacks by slaves on masters. For example, weakening of a damn wall permitting more of the hidden transcript to leak through, increasing the probabilities of a complete rupture.

Frederick Douglass reported an account of a physical fight with his master. Running the risk of death, Douglass not only spoke back to his master, but would not allow himself to be beaten. Out of pride and anger, Douglass fought off his master while not going so far as to beat him in turn.

He reports:

“I was nothing before; I was a man now…After resisting him I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection. I had reached the point where I was not afraid to die”

Douglass and others write of slaves who have somehow survived physical confrontations and have convinced their masters that they may be shot but cannot be whipped. The master is then confronted with an all-or-nothing choice.” (208)

In the Polish uprising against the Soviet government in 1980, the popular enthusiasm in the context of three decades of public silence was overwhelming:

To appreciate the quality of this “revolution of the soul” one must know that for 30 years, most Poles had lived a double life. They grew up with two codes of behavior, two languages – the pubic and the private – two histories – the official and the unofficial. From their school days they learned, not only to conceal in public their private opinions, but also to parrot another set of opinions prescribed by the ruling ideology. The end of this double life was a profound psychological gain for countless individuals…and now they discovered for certain that almost everyone around them actually felt the same way about the system as they did…The poet Stanisław Barańczak compared it to coming up for air after living for years under water. (212)

“For the first time in our lives we had taken a stand against the state. Before it was a taboo. I didn’t feel I was protesting just the price rise, although that’s what sparked it. It had to do with overthrowing at least in part everything we hated.”

There are historical circumstances that suddenly lower the danger of speaking out enough so that the previously timid are encouraged. The glasnost campaign of Gorbachev unleashed an unprecedented flurry of public declaration in the USSR. After the fall of the Soviet Union, state socialist heads in Eastern Europe squirmed, but the jig was up.

Millions of Romanians witnessed just such an epoch-making event during the televised rallies staged by President Nicolae Ceausescu on December 21, 1989, in Bucharest to demonstrate that he was still in command.

The young people started to boo. They jeered as the president, who still appeared unaware that trouble was mounting, rattled along denouncing anti-communist force. The booing grew louder and was briefly heard by the television audience, before technicians took over and voiced-over a sound track of canned applause. (204)

Raw vs cooked publicized hidden transcripts

There is a direct connection between the coherence of an open rebellion and the extent to which the hidden transcript has been “cooked”. The more the development of a hidden transcript has been suppressed by authoritarian regimes who have successfully atomized individuals through surveillance; the deliberately placing of people with geographical and linguistic differences in work groups, the more explosive and less coherent the uprising of public rebellion will be. Conversely, the more the hidden transcript has had a chance to be elaborated through repeated gatherings at subversive social sites, the more coherent and constructive the rebellion will be. Scott compares the degree to which hidden transcripts are shared to the electronic resistances on a single power grid:

We can metaphorically think of those with comparable hidden transcripts in a society as forming part of a single power grid. Small differences in hidden transcript within the grid might be considered analogous to electrical resistance causing losses of current. Many real interests are not sufficiently cohesive or widespread to create a latent power grid on which charismatic mobilization depends. (224)

Charisma as a social fire that transforms the hidden transcript into public transcript

When rebellions break out, one of the first things the authorities do is find out who “the leaders” are. Since it is hard for the authorities to imagine that most people are disgusted by their reign, they suppose that a charismatic leader had duped the well-intentioned or gullible masses down the road to damnation. If the first act of defiance succeeds and is spontaneously imitated by large numbers of others, an observer might well conclude that a herd of cattle with no individual wills or values has stampeded inadvertently. But charisma as a personal quality or aura of an individual that touches a secret power that makes others surrender their will and follow is comparatively rare and marginal. It ignores the reciprocity that must take place between leaders and followers for charisma to work. An individual has charisma only to the extent that others confer it upon them.

The hidden transcript is the socially produced rehearsal that has been scripted offstage by all members of the subordinate group over weeks, months and perhaps years. This hidden discourse created, cultivated and ripened in the nooks and crannies of the social order where subordinate groups can speak more freely. It is only when this hidden transcript is openly declared that subordinates can fully recognize the full extent to which their claims, dreams, and anger are shared by other subordinates with whom they have not been in direct touch. If there seems to be an instantaneous mutually and commonness of purpose, they are surely derived from the hidden transcript.

When some member of the lower castes, classes or religious groups has the nerve to voice what everyone else feels, of course,that individual becomes beloved and unforgettable. However, it is because that person has truly articulated something that was long overdue, an act or speech that truly swelled from the ground up that they are treated specially and followed. In other words, it was the time, place and circumstance that made their deed important, more than their individual qualities. Acts of daring might have been improvised on the public stage, but they had been long and amply prepared in the hidden transcript of folk culture and practice. Those who sing the catalyst’s praises are far from simple objects of manipulation. They quite genuinely recognized themselves in their speech or act. They invoked what Rousseau called the general will.

Scott closes his work majestically:

The first public declaration of the hidden transcript has a prehistory that explains its capacity to produce political breakthroughs. The courage of those who fail is likely to be noted, admired and even mythologized in stories of bravery, social banditry and noble sacrifice. They become themselves part of the hidden transcript.

It shouts what has historically had to be whispered, controlled, choked back, stifled and suppressed. If the results seem like moments of madness, if the politics they engender is tumultuous, frenetic, delirious and occasionally violent, that is perhaps because the powerless are so rarely on the public stage and have so much to say and do when they finally arrive. (227)

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

PART I

Orientation

Simplistic notions of Domination and Resistance: Polarized Dualities

When we examine the relations between those in power and those who are subordinate, a typical way of framing these relationships is as a duality. On one hand, those in power are ruling using various power bases such as force, coercion, and/or charisma. The impact of these power bases keeps people passive. In fact, some claim that that powerless people come to agree they deserve to be in the position they are in. At the other extreme are open insurrections where the powerless temporarily rebel or even enact a revolution to overthrow those in power. The problem is that there are no in-between stages or a spectrum between pure submission on the one hand and revolution on the other.

From force to coercion

The ultimate basis of domination in complex state societies is force. However, the use of constant force only works in times of conquest or open rebellions. When domination acquires a kind of social continuity, other forms of dominance are set in motion. James C. Scott, in his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance uses his experience as a sheep herder to compare the situation of sheep penned in by an electric fence with the dominant relations in human society.

If sheep are pastured in a field surrounded by a powerful electric fence, they will at first blunder into it and experience the painful shock. Once conditioned to the fence, the sheep will graze at a respectful distance. Occasionally, after working on the fence, I have forgotten to switch on the power again for days at a time, during which the sheep continue to avoid it. The fence continues to have the same associations for them despite the fact that the invisible power has been cut. (48)

In human affairs, this captures the movement from the use of force to coercion or the threat of force. However, the analogy breaks down when we compare the difference between the motivations and actions of sheep and humans.

With sheep we may only assume a constant desire to get to the pasture beyond the fence – it is generally greener on the other side of the fence since they will have grazed everything on their side. With tenants or sharecroppers, we may assume both a constant testing through poaching, pilfering…and a cultural capacity for collective anger and revenge. The point is that the symbols of power, provided that their potency was once experienced may continue to exert influence after they may have lost most or all of their effective power. (48)

The problem with social scientific understandings of power dynamics is that there is not much explanation of what is in between submission and revolution. But James C. Scott argues that rarely can we see a case where an individual slave, untouchable, or serf is being either entirely submissive or entirely insubordinate. In between submission/acceptance and open revolution there are other states of power.

Barrington Moore widens the spectrum between complete submission and revolution by arguing there are two other grades of resistance before the third stage of revolution:

• lower classes criticize some of the dominant stratum for having violated the norms by which they claim to rule;
• the lower classes accuse the entire stratum of failing to observe the principles of its rule;
• the lower classes repudiate the very principles by which the dominant stratum justifies its dominance. This would be to identify with alternatives to the dominant system.

Scott argues that the historical evidence clearly shows that subordinate groups have been capable of revolutionary thought that repudiates existing forms of domination. However, subordinate groups are not born with revolutionary consciousness. They prefer squatting to a defiant land invasion. They prefer evasion of taxes to a tax riot. They would prefer poaching or pilfering to direct appropriation. It is only when these behind-the-scenes measures fail that they might be open to more drastic measures. Scott argues that there is a whole spectrum of resistance that occurs before even the first of Moore’s three gradients, as we shall see shortly.

My presentation of Scott’s work has five parts. In this introductory section, I will discuss three theories of submission, “thick”, “thin” and “paper thin” states of submission. Then I will probe into Scott’s three dimensions of submission including material, status and ideological dimensions. In the second section I will cover what Scott calls the “public transcript“ which is dominated by elites. These forms include things like parades and coronations and control of language. There are also forms of resistance such as the gathering of crowds and how terrifying they were to elites because they were public gatherings of subordinates without authorization. Interpersonal forms of resistance include mocking body language and verbal language including voice intonation and sarcasm. This will conclude Part I of this article.

In Part II I describe Scott’s notion of the hidden transcript. Hidden transcripts require secret social sites in which to discuss, rehearse and resist elites. Elites attempt to minimize this hidden transcript by taking away social sites and attempting to atomize individuals. In the second section of Part II, I discuss two forms of resistance that come out of the hidden transcript. One is social-psychological strategies and the other is the cultural strategies of resistance. In the last section of Part II, I describe Scott’s analysis of how the process of resistance turns into open insubordination. This is the electrifying time when the hidden transcript goes public. The general movement of both articles goes from the public transcript controlled by elites, to hidden transcripts controlled by subordinates to a return to the public transcript, this time controlled by subordinates who are now becoming insubordinate.

Theories of submission

When the upper class has power in everyday life, force is not used directly to keep the lower classes continuing to produce a surplus but by enacting a public display of their submission though speech, gesture and manners. How do we make sense of how this can happen? For liberal pluralists, the absence of significant protest or radical opposition is taken as a sign of lower-class satisfaction with the existing order. John C. Scott disagrees.

Thick and thin forms of submission

At the other extreme of the political spectrum, “fundamentalist” Marxists contend that on a deep level, perhaps on an unconscious level, the lower classes are aware that their position is unjust and in revolutionary situations  will discover what has been buried inside them. According to them, in revolutionary situations the lower classes will become a “class-for-itself”. How do these Marxists explain the consciousness of the lower classes in non-revolutionary situations? They contend that in these times the working class has been convinced that the upper-class justifications for their power are legitimate – and they actively believe in those values. They consent to their position. This is what Marx called “false consciousness” or class-in-itself mind-set. Scott labels these Marxist depictions of the lower classes as a “thick forms of consciousness.” This means that as people become socialized, the mask that they wear to do their job and reproduce hierarchical relations grows slowly onto their face and over the long-haul the face becomes the mask.

I find this term “fundamentalist” useful to describe a scholastic approach of some Marxists to socio-historical issues which rely too heavily on original texts to explain new events in the world and resist dialectical incorporation of new research which has emerged since the text was  written. In addition, there is a denial of the fact that some of Marx’s predictions were simply wrong.

Both liberals and fundamental Marxists agree that the lower classes in their normal conditions are satisfied or have “bought” the existence of class society. More skeptical of this are those left-wing critics who think the lower classes are unhappy with their situation but they think it is natural and inevitable. Instead of being satisfied or yielding consent, they are resigned to their situation. Scott calls this theory “thin” forms of lower-class submission. This is close to what Gaventa calls intimidation or the rule of anticipated reactions. This means the lower classes elect not to challenge elites because they anticipate the sanctions that will be brought against them. It is an estimate of the hopeless odds which discourage a challenge. Zygmunt Bauman sees power relations as being kept intact because alternatives to the current structure are excluded. He says “The dominant culture consists of transforming everything which is not inevitable into the improbable.” Here there is still a mask but it is thinner. The lower classes are less “snowed”.

Scott’s super-thin forms of submission

From Scott’s research, he thinks there is little evidence for the ideological incorporation of the lower classes and much evidence that the dominant ideology gives support and cohesion to the upper class rather than the lower classes, similar to pep rallies.  For Scott, what both thin and thick forms of consciousness don’t explain is how social change could ever originate from below. Instead, he argues that all these theories miss the disguised and public forms of resistance which are the subject of this essay. Scott says that these “in-between” forms of resistance are predominant in caste, feudal, and, slave societies.

Besides historical study, Scott draws from social reactance theory. Social reactance theory works on the assumption that there is a human desire for freedom and autonomy. When subordinates feel that their subordination is freely chosen, they are most likely to comply. When subordination is perceived as not freely chosen, there is resistance. In persuasive communication studies, when threats are added to a persuasive communication, they reduce the degree of attitude change. In fact, threatened choice alternatively tends to become more attractive. For Scott, there is little chance that acting with a mask will appreciably affect the face of the actor. If it does, there is a better chance the face behind the mask will, in reaction, grow to look less like the mask, rather than more like it. Nevertheless, Scott specifies 3 conditions under which a “paper thin” mask metaphor may be apt:

• when there is a good chance a good many subordinates will eventually come to occupy positions of power. This encourages patience, emulation and explains why age graded systems of domination have such durability; and
• when subordinates are completely atomized, kept under close observation and have no opportunity to talk things over or engage in either public or disguised resistance. This might occur when subordinate groups are divided by geography, culture and language.
• When there is a promise of being set free in return for a record of service and compliance.

Scott’s work is the study of forms of resistance which exist in everyday life and are not revolutionary but exist as a kind of guerrilla warfare. His studies are drawn from pre-capitalist hierarchical societies including the reports of slaves, serfs, and untouchables. He ignores the specific differences between slave systems in North America or South America as well as differences between agricultural civilizations in China and India and European feudalism. He claims that his analysis has less relevance to forms of domination in industrial capitalist countries such as scientific techniques, bureaucratic rules or capitalist forces of supply and demand. Scott’s work is an attempt to track how struggles of lords and serfs, slave owners and slaves, Brahmins and untouchables are played out under coercive, rather than force conditions in everyday life.

Scott’s three-dimensional theory of subordination and resistance: material (technological and economic) status and ideological

James Scott divides the political economy of domination and submission into three dimensions: material domination and material resistance; status domination and status resistance; and ideological domination and ideological resistance. Please see Table 2 for an overview of how these dimensions play themselves out in dominance and resistance situations. Material domination includes the appropriation of grain, taxes, and labor by agricultural elites. Status domination consists of forcing subordinates to enact their subordination through ritual humiliations, etiquette, demeanor, gestures, verbal language such as “my lord,” or “your highness”. Soft speech levels include who speaks first to whom, codes of eating, dressing, bathing, cultural taste, and who gives way to whom in public.

Status indignities form a social-psychological bridge between the subordinates’ material condition and cultural ideological justifications for why they are in the state they are in. Status indignities are the subjective and inter-subjective experience of being poor and landless. For example, they are in psychological despair because they cannot afford to feed guests on the feast of Ramadan; they are upset by wealthy people who pass him on the village path without uttering a greeting; he cannot bury his parents properly or their daughter will marry late, if at all because she lacks a dowry. The worst indignities are suffered by audiences of those who form the social source for one’s sense of self-esteem – that is closest friends, families, and neighbors. Ideological domination includes whatever religious justifications exist for why the upper classes deserve to be in the position they are in. Scott calls all three dimensions the “public transcript”.

Material resistance is divided into two types, public resistance and disguised resistance (cells 2 and 3 of table 2.) Public material resistance is what you might suspect. The usual tactics used by subordinate groups in reformist or revolutionary situations include petitions, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, and land invasions. Public status resistance includes insubordinate gestures, postures, and open desecration of status symbols. This might include the victim’s pleasure at seeing superiors dressed down by their superiors. Once this occurs, things are never the same. Public ideological resistance includes counter ideologies which propagate equality, such as liberalism or socialism. They might also include religious heresies of spiritual equality.

The three dimensions of public dominance correspond to what most sociologists and theories of power address. Scott might call this “high politics”. Formal political organization is the realm of elites where resolutions, declarations, and laws are enacted by politicians used in written records, news stories, and law suits.  In countries with a liberal industrial capitalist orientation, an exclusive concern with open political action will capture and normalize some forms of resistance such as petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and group organizing to make them ineffective. Political liberties of speech and association have lowered the risks and difficulty of open political expression.

But in conservative, dictatorship, industrial capitalist societies or in the slave, caste, and feudal societies most people are subjects, not citizens. If high politics is considered to be all of what politics is, then it appears that subordinate groups in these societies lack a political life, unless they engage in strikes, rebellions, or revolutions  – that is, “resistant” politics (second cell).

“Infrapolitics” is the circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups and is like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum. If formal political organization is the realm of elites, infrapolitics is the realm of informal leadership of nonelites, of conversation and oral discourse. “Infrapolitics” provides much of the cultural and structural underpinning for the more visible political resistance that may come later. Infrapolitics is a kind of guerrilla warfare where one side advances to see if it its tactics survive or are attacked and if so, with what strength? This is the subject of Scott’s work. He argues that to focus on the visible coastline of high politics misses the continent of infrapolitics.

Forms of disguised infrapolitics fall into three dimensions, material disguised resistance, status disguised resistance and ideological disguised resistance. Together all three are called “the hidden transcript.” Scott’s interest is in the status and ideological dimensions rather than the material dimension of infrapolitics because the material dimension has already been covered by Marxist fundamentalism.

Direct resistance by disguised resisters includes masked appropriations of food or land and anonymous threats. Practices of material disguised resistance include poaching, squatting, desertion, evasions, or fraudulent declarations of the amount of land farmed. In addition, direct resistance can include simple failures to declare land, underpayment, delivery of paddy spoiled by moisture or contaminated with rocks and mud, and foot-dragging. The lower classes can use gullibility and ignorance that are elite stereotypes of them such. These may incluede “laziness” to do less work and resist taxes, land dues, conscription and grain appropriation. In playing dumb, subordinate make creative use of the stereotypes intended to stigmatize them. Refusal to understand is also a form of class struggle.

Status disguised resistance includes what subordinates say and do with each other behind closed doors to counter status insults. This includes rituals of aggression, tales of revenge, gossip, rumor, and the creation of autonomous social sites. Gossip and rumor are designed to have a double meaning. This applies also to folk tales, jokes, songs, rituals, codes, and euphemisms.

Ideological, disguised resistance includes the development of dissident subcultures, millennial religions, myths of social banditry, and the return of the good king, carnival and world-upside down arts and crafts, which was also very powerful. Ideological disguised resistance also has a double meaning such as jokes, euphemisms, and the Br’er Rabbit stories of slaves. Altogether, there are six forms of resistance, three forms of public resistance, and three forms of disguised resistance. The table below helps to differentiate them.

The Public Transcript of Domination and Resistance

The public transcript is the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate them. The public transcript is the self-portrait of the dominant elites as they would have themselves seen. This can take the form of collective performances such as public displays with little interpersonal interaction and interpersonal performances where there is actual dialogue.

Dominance performances: parades and coronations

Formal ceremonies such as parades, inaugurations, processions, and coronations celebrate and dramatize the rule of dominators. They are choreographed in such a way as to prevent surprises. All parades imply a hierarchical order, a precise gradation of status, with the king at the head and the lowliest at the rear. They are authoritarian gatherings. In formal ceremonies, subordinates only gather when they are authorized.

Rather like iron filings aligned by a powerful magnet, subordinates are gathered in an arrangement and for purposes determined by their superiors…

In a parade, there are no horizontal links among subordinates. Without the hierarchy and authority that knits them into a unit they appear as  mere atoms with no social existence….subordinates are nothing but potatoes in a sack (61-62)

Who are these performances for? At first guess, you might think that coronations serve the purpose of displaying to their subordinates the might and coordination of the dominant. But according to Scott, they are not very successful in doing this. He claims that this domination performances is a kind of self-hypnosis within ruling groups to buck up their courage. The authorities want to create appearance of unanimity among ruling groups. This is why it is very important that ruling classes suppress members of their own class from disagreeing publicly.

Public Transcripts of Domination: Interpersonal

Deferential behavior by subordinates in public interactions includes encouraging smiles, appreciative laughter and conformity in facial expression and gesture. Gender differences in language are interesting here. For example, women use tag questions and a rising tone at the end of a declarative sentence, including the use of hyper-polite tones, linguistic hedges, stammering, and no public joking. (Scott says it is interesting to consider that there are few women comedians.) Subordination and domination are built into the different usages in terms of bodily functions. Scott sites the following examples: “Whereas commoners bathe, the Sultan sprinkles himself; while commoners walk, the Sultan progresses (assuming a smooth, gliding motion); while commoners sleep, the Sultan reclines.” In slave societies, slaves are referred to as boys, whereas whites are referenced as “mister”.

The upper classes also use euphemisms, that is verbal language, gestures, architecture, ritual actions, and public ceremonies to obscure the ultimate force-basis use of rule. For example in terms of language,  “pacification” is used instead of “armed attack and occupation”; “calming” for “confinement by straightjacket”; “capital punishment” for “state execution”; “re-education camps” for “prison for political opponents”; and “trade in ebony wood” for “traffic in slaves”. Scott says when bosses fire workers they say “we had to let them go”, as if workers in question were mercifully released like dogs straining on their leashes.

On the other hand, the practices of their opponents are vilified and presented in categories which delegitimize their opposition. Authorities deny rebels the status of public discourse and try to assimilate their acts into a category that minimizes the political challenge by calling them bandits and criminals, hooligans, or mentally deranged. Religious practices that challenge the corrupt practices of the authorities are labeled heresy, Satanism, or witchcraft.

Public transcripts of resistance: crowds

An unauthorized gathering was potentially threatening. It is so threatening to the upper classes that they call such gatherings “mobs” or “rabble”. In other words, they think people run amok because they have no authorities ruling over them. A gathering is an unauthorized coordination of subordinates by subordinates.

In an agricultural bureaucratic state in the East or a feudal society in the West, the presentation of a petition to the ruler to redress peasant grievances was itself a capital crime.  Gatherings of five or more slaves without the presence of a white observer were forbidden. The authorities were uneasy about the holidays because they lacked the structure of work and brought together large numbers of slaves. This is why there was a law in France in 1838 forbidding public discussion between work peers.

Pubic transcripts of resistance: interpersonal 

Those in subordinate positions may refuse to enact submissive facial gestures, make way for elites on the street, or addressing them with mock intonations or exaggerated submissiveness, refusal to laugh at jokes of the upper classes.

Public transcripts of resistance: ideological

Holding the elites’ feet to the fire

Elites cannot do just as they please. Because much of their power is legitimized, they must at least make a passable attempt to perform some valuable social functions. This requires that it must:

• specify the claims to legitimacy it makes;
• develop discursive affirmations it stages for the public transcript;
• identify aspects of power relations it will seek to hide (its dirty linen);
• specify the acts and gestures that will undermine its claim to legitimacy;
• tolerate critiques that are possible within its frame of reference; and
• identify the ideas and actions that will represent a repudiation of profanation of the form of domination in its entirety.

Elites are vulnerable to attack if these conditions are compromised.

For example, in feudalism, honor, noblesseoblige, bravery, and expansive generosity are expected from the aristocrats. The feudal contract would be negated by any conduct that violated these affirmations such as cowardice, petty bargaining, stinginess, the presence of runaway serfs, and failure to physically protect serfs. In the case of the Brahmins, elites would need to possess superior karma, vital ritual services, refinement in manner, presiding at key rites of birth, and observance of taboos are expected.

Return of the Just King

Very often the lower classes play off the king against the aristocracy. It is the king who represents the true interests of the serfs, untouchables, or slaves against the abuses of the nobles. Scott argues that, Lenin notwithstanding, there is simply no evidence that the myth of the Czar promoted political passivity among the peasantry. Furthermore, there is a fair amount of evidence that the myth facilitated peasant resistance. When petitions to the Czar failed, instead of turning on the Czar, serfs then suspected that an imposter, a false czar was on the throne. Under the reign of Catherine II, there were at least 26 pretenders. Pugachev, the leader of one of the greatest peasant rebellions, owed his success in part to his claim to be Czar Peter III. The myth of the czar could transmute the peasantry’s violent resistance to oppression to any act of loyalty to the Crown.

Fundamentalist Marxists, using thick forms of subordinate consciousness, claim that the myth of the kind czar is an ideological creation of the monarchy, then appropriated and reinterpreted by the peasantry. Scott argues that these myths were the joint product of a historic struggle rather like a ferocious argument in which the basic terms – simple peasant, benevolent czar – are shared but in which interpretations follow wildly divergent paths in accordance with vital interests.

Throughout Europe and southeast Asia there are long traditions of the return of a just king. Indian untouchables have imagined that Orthodox Hinduism has hidden sacred texts proving their equality. Slaves have imagined a day when they would be free and slave owners punished for their tyranny. Contrary to Gramsci, radicalism may be less likely to arise among disadvantaged groups who fail to take the dominant ideology seriously because they haven’t yet constructed an alternative.

Summary

Subordination requires a credible performance of humility and deference, while domination requires a performance of haughtiness and mastery. Transgresses of script have more serious consequences for subordinates, and subordinates are closer observers of the dominant because there is more to lose. The same is true for women in relation to men and children and in relation to their parents. People in dominant positions think characteristics of subordinates are inborn, rather than staged for them.

Coming Attractions

Up to now all the resistance offered by subordinates does not include any systematic interpersonal discussion by them. There must be a specific social gathering site, usually in secret where subordinates can speak freely. Secondly, those subordinates must be trustworthy, often members of the same slave master family, kin or neighbors, and have very specific working conditions as we shall see in Part II. We will explore two forms of disguise. Disguising the message and disguising the messenger. What is the place of myth and folktales? Are these stories diversions from revolution or rehearsals for it? Is smashing statues or reversing roles in carnival cathartic releases which then make people more docile or do they provide people with a structure for systematic revolt? Finally, what are the conditions when the hidden transcript of resistance finally turns into a public transcript of insubordination or revolution?

All of this will be covered in Part II.

PART I

Orientation

Simplistic notions of Domination and Resistance: Polarized Dualities

When we examine the relations between those in power and those who are subordinate, a typical way of framing these relationships is as a duality. On one hand, those in power are ruling using various power bases such as force, coercion, and/or charisma. The impact of these power bases keeps people passive. In fact, some claim that that powerless people come to agree they deserve to be in the position they are in. At the other extreme are open insurrections where the powerless temporarily rebel or even enact a revolution to overthrow those in power. The problem is that there are no in-between stages or a spectrum between pure submission on the one hand and revolution on the other.

From force to coercion

The ultimate basis of domination in complex state societies is force. However, the use of constant force only works in times of conquest or open rebellions. When domination acquires a kind of social continuity, other forms of dominance are set in motion. James C. Scott, in his book Domination and the Arts of Resistance uses his experience as a sheep herder to compare the situation of sheep penned in by an electric fence with the dominant relations in human society.

If sheep are pastured in a field surrounded by a powerful electric fence, they will at first blunder into it and experience the painful shock. Once conditioned to the fence, the sheep will graze at a respectful distance. Occasionally, after working on the fence, I have forgotten to switch on the power again for days at a time, during which the sheep continue to avoid it. The fence continues to have the same associations for them despite the fact that the invisible power has been cut. (48)

In human affairs, this captures the movement from the use of force to coercion or the threat of force. However, the analogy breaks down when we compare the difference between the motivations and actions of sheep and humans.

With sheep we may only assume a constant desire to get to the pasture beyond the fence – it is generally greener on the other side of the fence since they will have grazed everything on their side. With tenants or sharecroppers, we may assume both a constant testing through poaching, pilfering…and a cultural capacity for collective anger and revenge. The point is that the symbols of power, provided that their potency was once experienced may continue to exert influence after they may have lost most or all of their effective power. (48)

The problem with social scientific understandings of power dynamics is that there is not much explanation of what is in between submission and revolution. But James C. Scott argues that rarely can we see a case where an individual slave, untouchable, or serf is being either entirely submissive or entirely insubordinate. In between submission/acceptance and open revolution there are other states of power.

Barrington Moore widens the spectrum between complete submission and revolution by arguing there are two other grades of resistance before the third stage of revolution:

• lower classes criticize some of the dominant stratum for having violated the norms by which they claim to rule;
• the lower classes accuse the entire stratum of failing to observe the principles of its rule;
• the lower classes repudiate the very principles by which the dominant stratum justifies its dominance. This would be to identify with alternatives to the dominant system.

Scott argues that the historical evidence clearly shows that subordinate groups have been capable of revolutionary thought that repudiates existing forms of domination. However, subordinate groups are not born with revolutionary consciousness. They prefer squatting to a defiant land invasion. They prefer evasion of taxes to a tax riot. They would prefer poaching or pilfering to direct appropriation. It is only when these behind-the-scenes measures fail that they might be open to more drastic measures. Scott argues that there is a whole spectrum of resistance that occurs before even the first of Moore’s three gradients, as we shall see shortly.

My presentation of Scott’s work has five parts. In this introductory section, I will discuss three theories of submission, “thick”, “thin” and “paper thin” states of submission. Then I will probe into Scott’s three dimensions of submission including material, status and ideological dimensions. In the second section I will cover what Scott calls the “public transcript“ which is dominated by elites. These forms include things like parades and coronations and control of language. There are also forms of resistance such as the gathering of crowds and how terrifying they were to elites because they were public gatherings of subordinates without authorization. Interpersonal forms of resistance include mocking body language and verbal language including voice intonation and sarcasm. This will conclude Part I of this article.

In Part II I describe Scott’s notion of the hidden transcript. Hidden transcripts require secret social sites in which to discuss, rehearse and resist elites. Elites attempt to minimize this hidden transcript by taking away social sites and attempting to atomize individuals. In the second section of Part II, I discuss two forms of resistance that come out of the hidden transcript. One is social-psychological strategies and the other is the cultural strategies of resistance. In the last section of Part II, I describe Scott’s analysis of how the process of resistance turns into open insubordination. This is the electrifying time when the hidden transcript goes public. The general movement of both articles goes from the public transcript controlled by elites, to hidden transcripts controlled by subordinates to a return to the public transcript, this time controlled by subordinates who are now becoming insubordinate.

Theories of submission

When the upper class has power in everyday life, force is not used directly to keep the lower classes continuing to produce a surplus but by enacting a public display of their submission though speech, gesture and manners. How do we make sense of how this can happen? For liberal pluralists, the absence of significant protest or radical opposition is taken as a sign of lower-class satisfaction with the existing order. John C. Scott disagrees.

Thick and thin forms of submission

At the other extreme of the political spectrum, “fundamentalist” Marxists contend that on a deep level, perhaps on an unconscious level, the lower classes are aware that their position is unjust and in revolutionary situations  will discover what has been buried inside them. According to them, in revolutionary situations the lower classes will become a “class-for-itself”. How do these Marxists explain the consciousness of the lower classes in non-revolutionary situations? They contend that in these times the working class has been convinced that the upper-class justifications for their power are legitimate – and they actively believe in those values. They consent to their position. This is what Marx called “false consciousness” or class-in-itself mind-set. Scott labels these Marxist depictions of the lower classes as a “thick forms of consciousness.” This means that as people become socialized, the mask that they wear to do their job and reproduce hierarchical relations grows slowly onto their face and over the long-haul the face becomes the mask.

I find this term “fundamentalist” useful to describe a scholastic approach of some Marxists to socio-historical issues which rely too heavily on original texts to explain new events in the world and resist dialectical incorporation of new research which has emerged since the text was  written. In addition, there is a denial of the fact that some of Marx’s predictions were simply wrong.

Both liberals and fundamental Marxists agree that the lower classes in their normal conditions are satisfied or have “bought” the existence of class society. More skeptical of this are those left-wing critics who think the lower classes are unhappy with their situation but they think it is natural and inevitable. Instead of being satisfied or yielding consent, they are resigned to their situation. Scott calls this theory “thin” forms of lower-class submission. This is close to what Gaventa calls intimidation or the rule of anticipated reactions. This means the lower classes elect not to challenge elites because they anticipate the sanctions that will be brought against them. It is an estimate of the hopeless odds which discourage a challenge. Zygmunt Bauman sees power relations as being kept intact because alternatives to the current structure are excluded. He says “The dominant culture consists of transforming everything which is not inevitable into the improbable.” Here there is still a mask but it is thinner. The lower classes are less “snowed”.                                                           

Scott’s super-thin forms of submission

From Scott’s research, he thinks there is little evidence for the ideological incorporation of the lower classes and much evidence that the dominant ideology gives support and cohesion to the upper class rather than the lower classes, similar to pep rallies.  For Scott, what both thin and thick forms of consciousness don’t explain is how social change could ever originate from below. Instead, he argues that all these theories miss the disguised and public forms of resistance which are the subject of this essay. Scott says that these “in-between” forms of resistance are predominant in caste, feudal, and, slave societies.

Besides historical study, Scott draws from social reactance theory. Social reactance theory works on the assumption that there is a human desire for freedom and autonomy. When subordinates feel that their subordination is freely chosen, they are most likely to comply. When subordination is perceived as not freely chosen, there is resistance. In persuasive communication studies, when threats are added to a persuasive communication, they reduce the degree of attitude change. In fact, threatened choice alternatively tends to become more attractive. For Scott, there is little chance that acting with a mask will appreciably affect the face of the actor. If it does, there is a better chance the face behind the mask will, in reaction, grow to look less like the mask, rather than more like it. Nevertheless, Scott specifies 3 conditions under which a “paper thin” mask metaphor may be apt:

• when there is a good chance a good many subordinates will eventually come to occupy positions of power. This encourages patience, emulation and explains why age graded systems of domination have such durability; and
• when subordinates are completely atomized, kept under close observation and have no opportunity to talk things over or engage in either public or disguised resistance. This might occur when subordinate groups are divided by geography, culture and language.
• When there is a promise of being set free in return for a record of service and compliance. 

Scott’s work is the study of forms of resistance which exist in everyday life and are not revolutionary but exist as a kind of guerrilla warfare. His studies are drawn from pre-capitalist hierarchical societies including the reports of slaves, serfs, and untouchables. He ignores the specific differences between slave systems in North America or South America as well as differences between agricultural civilizations in China and India and European feudalism. He claims that his analysis has less relevance to forms of domination in industrial capitalist countries such as scientific techniques, bureaucratic rules or capitalist forces of supply and demand. Scott’s work is an attempt to track how struggles of lords and serfs, slave owners and slaves, Brahmins and untouchables are played out under coercive, rather than force conditions in everyday life.

Scott’s three-dimensional theory of subordination and resistance: material (technological and economic) status and ideological

James Scott divides the political economy of domination and submission into three dimensions: material domination and material resistance; status domination and status resistance; and ideological domination and ideological resistance. Please see Table 2 for an overview of how these dimensions play themselves out in dominance and resistance situations. Material domination includes the appropriation of grain, taxes, and labor by agricultural elites. Status domination consists of forcing subordinates to enact their subordination through ritual humiliations, etiquette, demeanor, gestures, verbal language such as “my lord,” or “your highness”. Soft speech levels include who speaks first to whom, codes of eating, dressing, bathing, cultural taste, and who gives way to whom in public.

Status indignities form a social-psychological bridge between the subordinates’ material condition and cultural ideological justifications for why they are in the state they are in. Status indignities are the subjective and inter-subjective experience of being poor and landless. For example, they are in psychological despair because they cannot afford to feed guests on the feast of Ramadan; they are upset by wealthy people who pass him on the village path without uttering a greeting; he cannot bury his parents properly or their daughter will marry late, if at all because she lacks a dowry. The worst indignities are suffered by audiences of those who form the social source for one’s sense of self-esteem – that is closest friends, families, and neighbors. Ideological domination includes whatever religious justifications exist for why the upper classes deserve to be in the position they are in. Scott calls all three dimensions the “public transcript”.

Material resistance is divided into two types, public resistance and disguised resistance (cells 2 and 3 of table 2.) Public material resistance is what you might suspect. The usual tactics used by subordinate groups in reformist or revolutionary situations include petitions, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, and land invasions. Public status resistance includes insubordinate gestures, postures, and open desecration of status symbols. This might include the victim’s pleasure at seeing superiors dressed down by their superiors. Once this occurs, things are never the same. Public ideological resistance includes counter ideologies which propagate equality, such as liberalism or socialism. They might also include religious heresies of spiritual equality.

The three dimensions of public dominance correspond to what most sociologists and theories of power address. Scott might call this “high politics”. Formal political organization is the realm of elites where resolutions, declarations, and laws are enacted by politicians used in written records, news stories, and law suits.  In countries with a liberal industrial capitalist orientation, an exclusive concern with open political action will capture and normalize some forms of resistance such as petitions, demonstrations, boycotts and group organizing to make them ineffective. Political liberties of speech and association have lowered the risks and difficulty of open political expression.

But in conservative, dictatorship, industrial capitalist societies or in the slave, caste, and feudal societies most people are subjects, not citizens. If high politics is considered to be all of what politics is, then it appears that subordinate groups in these societies lack a political life, unless they engage in strikes, rebellions, or revolutions  – that is, “resistant” politics (second cell).

“Infrapolitics” is the circumspect struggle waged daily by subordinate groups and is like infrared rays, beyond the visible end of the spectrum. If formal political organization is the realm of elites, infrapolitics is the realm of informal leadership of nonelites, of conversation and oral discourse. “Infrapolitics” provides much of the cultural and structural underpinning for the more visible political resistance that may come later. Infrapolitics is a kind of guerrilla warfare where one side advances to see if it its tactics survive or are attacked and if so, with what strength? This is the subject of Scott’s work. He argues that to focus on the visible coastline of high politics misses the continent of infrapolitics.

Forms of disguised infrapolitics fall into three dimensions, material disguised resistance, status disguised resistance and ideological disguised resistance. Together all three are called “the hidden transcript.” Scott’s interest is in the status and ideological dimensions rather than the material dimension of infrapolitics because the material dimension has already been covered by Marxist fundamentalism.

Direct resistance by disguised resisters includes masked appropriations of food or land and anonymous threats. Practices of material disguised resistance include poaching, squatting, desertion, evasions, or fraudulent declarations of the amount of land farmed. In addition, direct resistance can include simple failures to declare land, underpayment, delivery of paddy spoiled by moisture or contaminated with rocks and mud, and foot-dragging. The lower classes can use gullibility and ignorance that are elite stereotypes of them such. These may incluede “laziness” to do less work and resist taxes, land dues, conscription and grain appropriation. In playing dumb, subordinate make creative use of the stereotypes intended to stigmatize them. Refusal to understand is also a form of class struggle.

Status disguised resistance includes what subordinates say and do with each other behind closed doors to counter status insults. This includes rituals of aggression, tales of revenge, gossip, rumor, and the creation of autonomous social sites. Gossip and rumor are designed to have a double meaning. This applies also to folk tales, jokes, songs, rituals, codes, and euphemisms.

Ideological, disguised resistance includes the development of dissident subcultures, millennial religions, myths of social banditry, and the return of the good king, carnival and world-upside down arts and crafts, which was also very powerful. Ideological disguised resistance also has a double meaning such as jokes, euphemisms, and the Br’er Rabbit stories of slaves. Altogether, there are six forms of resistance, three forms of public resistance, and three forms of disguised resistance. The table below helps to differentiate them.

The Public Transcript of Domination and Resistance

The public transcript is the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate them. The public transcript is the self-portrait of the dominant elites as they would have themselves seen. This can take the form of collective performances such as public displays with little interpersonal interaction and interpersonal performances where there is actual dialogue.

Dominance performances: parades and coronations

Formal ceremonies such as parades, inaugurations, processions, and coronations celebrate and dramatize the rule of dominators. They are choreographed in such a way as to prevent surprises. All parades imply a hierarchical order, a precise gradation of status, with the king at the head and the lowliest at the rear. They are authoritarian gatherings. In formal ceremonies, subordinates only gather when they are authorized.

Rather like iron filings aligned by a powerful magnet, subordinates are gathered in an arrangement and for purposes determined by their superiors…

In a parade, there are no horizontal links among subordinates. Without the hierarchy and authority that knits them into a unit they appear as  mere atoms with no social existence….subordinates are nothing but potatoes in a sack (61-62)

Who are these performances for? At first guess, you might think that coronations serve the purpose of displaying to their subordinates the might and coordination of the dominant. But according to Scott, they are not very successful in doing this. He claims that this domination performances is a kind of self-hypnosis within ruling groups to buck up their courage. The authorities want to create appearance of unanimity among ruling groups. This is why it is very important that ruling classes suppress members of their own class from disagreeing publicly.

Public Transcripts of Domination: Interpersonal

Deferential behavior by subordinates in public interactions includes encouraging smiles, appreciative laughter and conformity in facial expression and gesture. Gender differences in language are interesting here. For example, women use tag questions and a rising tone at the end of a declarative sentence, including the use of hyper-polite tones, linguistic hedges, stammering, and no public joking. (Scott says it is interesting to consider that there are few women comedians.) Subordination and domination are built into the different usages in terms of bodily functions. Scott sites the following examples: “Whereas commoners bathe, the Sultan sprinkles himself; while commoners walk, the Sultan progresses (assuming a smooth, gliding motion); while commoners sleep, the Sultan reclines.” In slave societies, slaves are referred to as boys, whereas whites are referenced as “mister”.

The upper classes also use euphemisms, that is verbal language, gestures, architecture, ritual actions, and public ceremonies to obscure the ultimate force-basis use of rule. For example in terms of language,  “pacification” is used instead of “armed attack and occupation”; “calming” for “confinement by straightjacket”; “capital punishment” for “state execution”; “re-education camps” for “prison for political opponents”; and “trade in ebony wood” for “traffic in slaves”. Scott says when bosses fire workers they say “we had to let them go”, as if workers in question were mercifully released like dogs straining on their leashes.

On the other hand, the practices of their opponents are vilified and presented in categories which delegitimize their opposition. Authorities deny rebels the status of public discourse and try to assimilate their acts into a category that minimizes the political challenge by calling them bandits and criminals, hooligans, or mentally deranged. Religious practices that challenge the corrupt practices of the authorities are labeled heresy, Satanism, or witchcraft.

Public transcripts of resistance: crowds

An unauthorized gathering was potentially threatening. It is so threatening to the upper classes that they call such gatherings “mobs” or “rabble”. In other words, they think people run amok because they have no authorities ruling over them. A gathering is an unauthorized coordination of subordinates by subordinates.

In an agricultural bureaucratic state in the East or a feudal society in the West, the presentation of a petition to the ruler to redress peasant grievances was itself a capital crime.  Gatherings of five or more slaves without the presence of a white observer were forbidden. The authorities were uneasy about the holidays because they lacked the structure of work and brought together large numbers of slaves. This is why there was a law in France in 1838 forbidding public discussion between work peers.

Pubic transcripts of resistance: interpersonal

Those in subordinate positions may refuse to enact submissive facial gestures, make way for elites on the street, or addressing them with mock intonations or exaggerated submissiveness, refusal to laugh at jokes of the upper classes.

Public transcripts of resistance: ideological

Holding the elites’ feet to the fire

Elites cannot do just as they please. Because much of their power is legitimized, they must at least make a passable attempt to perform some valuable social functions. This requires that it must:

• specify the claims to legitimacy it makes;
• develop discursive affirmations it stages for the public transcript;
• identify aspects of power relations it will seek to hide (its dirty linen);
• specify the acts and gestures that will undermine its claim to legitimacy;
• tolerate critiques that are possible within its frame of reference; and
• identify the ideas and actions that will represent a repudiation of profanation of the form of domination in its entirety.

Elites are vulnerable to attack if these conditions are compromised.

For example, in feudalism, honor, noblesseoblige, bravery, and expansive generosity are expected from the aristocrats. The feudal contract would be negated by any conduct that violated these affirmations such as cowardice, petty bargaining, stinginess, the presence of runaway serfs, and failure to physically protect serfs. In the case of the Brahmins, elites would need to possess superior karma, vital ritual services, refinement in manner, presiding at key rites of birth, and observance of taboos are expected.

Return of the Just King

Very often the lower classes play off the king against the aristocracy. It is the king who represents the true interests of the serfs, untouchables, or slaves against the abuses of the nobles. Scott argues that, Lenin notwithstanding, there is simply no evidence that the myth of the Czar promoted political passivity among the peasantry. Furthermore, there is a fair amount of evidence that the myth facilitated peasant resistance. When petitions to the Czar failed, instead of turning on the Czar, serfs then suspected that an imposter, a false czar was on the throne. Under the reign of Catherine II, there were at least 26 pretenders. Pugachev, the leader of one of the greatest peasant rebellions, owed his success in part to his claim to be Czar Peter III. The myth of the czar could transmute the peasantry’s violent resistance to oppression to any act of loyalty to the Crown.

Fundamentalist Marxists, using thick forms of subordinate consciousness, claim that the myth of the kind czar is an ideological creation of the monarchy, then appropriated and reinterpreted by the peasantry. Scott argues that these myths were the joint product of a historic struggle rather like a ferocious argument in which the basic terms – simple peasant, benevolent czar – are shared but in which interpretations follow wildly divergent paths in accordance with vital interests.

Throughout Europe and southeast Asia there are long traditions of the return of a just king. Indian untouchables have imagined that Orthodox Hinduism has hidden sacred texts proving their equality. Slaves have imagined a day when they would be free and slave owners punished for their tyranny. Contrary to Gramsci, radicalism may be less likely to arise among disadvantaged groups who fail to take the dominant ideology seriously because they haven’t yet constructed an alternative.

Summary

Subordination requires a credible performance of humility and deference, while domination requires a performance of haughtiness and mastery. Transgresses of script have more serious consequences for subordinates, and subordinates are closer observers of the dominant because there is more to lose. The same is true for women in relation to men and children and in relation to their parents. People in dominant positions think characteristics of subordinates are inborn, rather than staged for them.

Coming Attractions

Up to now all the resistance offered by subordinates does not include any systematic interpersonal discussion by them. There must be a specific social gathering site, usually in secret where subordinates can speak freely. Secondly, those subordinates must be trustworthy, often members of the same slave master family, kin or neighbors, and have very specific working conditions as we shall see in Part II. We will explore two forms of disguise. Disguising the message and disguising the messenger. What is the place of myth and folktales? Are these stories diversions from revolution or rehearsals for it? Is smashing statues or reversing roles in carnival cathartic releases which then make people more docile or do they provide people with a structure for systematic revolt? Finally, what are the conditions when the hidden transcript of resistance finally turns into a public transcript of insubordination or revolution?

All of this will be covered in Part II.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.