How did the rural poor in this heavily populated, agrarian Pashtun region view their social position and scope for social agency? What demands did they make of the future, and of people more powerful than them? We have few records for the subjectivity of rural subaltern populations of Afghanistan much before the 1970s. This paper uses oral Pashto poetry and biography in order to attempt to draw a picture. On one hand, metaphors and practices of kinship and patriarchy often appear to have defused class conflict; and much class conflict revolved around demands that the powerful fulfill their honorable duties to the poor, not that they be "leveled". On the other hand, some subaltern intellectuals directly challenged personalized exercise of patrimonial power through structural critiques of society; while others used itinerancy and asceticism to exist along Deleuzian "lines of flight", and questioned all social structure.