XIII. From Clastres to Cairo to Kobane: Learning from States

Through the course of this book, we have looked at several models of secondary and primary state formation. Primary state formation, rare in world history, is a process by which a society with no knowledge of existing states forms a state through autochthonous processes. Secondary state formation, much more common, is when a society develops a state influenced or aided by an already existing state. We might refine the latter category by detaching from it a third one, tertiary state formation, which requires direct intervention and administration by a fully formed state, in order to restore state power to previously statist populations in which state authority had been weakened or destroyed, or to impose its authority on a population that had previously resisted full integration under a state.

Tertiary:

the progressive state

the colony state

the neo-colonial state

the revolutionary state

the settler state

Secondary:

the imitative state

the rebel state

the reluctant client state

the conquest state

the projectual state

the true believers’ state

Primary:

the royal court state

the holy father state

the raider state

the sacred commerce state

These models are not intended to be strict typologies nor any kind of pseudo-objective classification of different “species” of state. Most historical instances of politogenesis will likely include characteristics from more than one model. Taken individually, the models provide a simplified version that allows the dynamics of a specific case of state formation to be conceptually appreciated. Taken together, they trace broad patterns with two important theoretical results. The first is to communicate unmistakably that state formation is a multilineal process and not a teleological, progressive evolution. The second is to outline the broad patterns that have characterized very different histories of state formation throughout world history; the range of these patterns completely refutes classical statist doctrine, both Hobbesian and Lockean variants, as well as Marxist and primitivist doctrine about state formation, and it seriously problematizes environmental determinist theories of state formation. The evidence presented confirms the theoretical suggestions regarding state formation made by anarchist thinkers like Bakunin and Kropotkin, as well as the more systematic theoretical framework offered by Clastres. Though significant modifications are necessary in light of a larger body of research, their fundamental arguments stand: the State is a motor of economic exploitation, and an institutional development that allows the enslavement of society.

The purpose of this book, however, is not to simply make a theoretical contribution, a proffering of data on the altar of science, and move on. My interest in studying the state flows directly from my lived experiences as a state subject, which I could politely characterize as unfavorable, unhealthy, involuntary, and antagonistic. These experiences leave me and many others with an unambiguous desire to destroy the State, and this book is one among many initiatives intended to sharpen the struggle against all domination. Information alone accomplishes nothing. Learning is only worthwhile if it helps us to fight, to live healthy, to live free.

Pierre Clastres offers us one story of a society that was in the process of bucking social hierarchy when European colonization interrupted their way of life. Among the Tupi-Guarani, in the lands today occupied by the states of Paraguay and Brazil, were the largest and densest of the stateless Amazonian societies. Many villages included thousands of inhabitants, and their chiefs were steadily concentrating more power. Within this context, a seemingly endless supply of prophets arose, urging people to listen to the gods, warning against “the Evil of One,” and organizing periodic mass pilgrimages to the sea, which, if the people had sufficiently purged themselves through fasting and observance of righteous conducts, would open up for them, delivering them from the Bad Earth. Clastres argues that this religious movement, which began before the arrival of the Portuguese and traces of which survive to this day, is a movement against the unification, centralization, and stratification accompanying the growth of political power, a movement that seeks to abandon what were the first outlines of an emerging state. [213]

We know that attempts to abandon states or evade state power are universal; they have probably affected every state in the history of the world. But we have fewer opportunities to see, or at least to imagine, the mass abandonment of a hierarchical political structure that does not yet have coercive authority, as an effective measure of state prevention. What we do have are numerous archaeological “mysteries,” states and proto-states that collapsed without any clear environmental or external political cause. As a rule, scientists refuse to consider the possibility of popular rebellion. From an ironically anthropological perspective, it would be fair to describe scientists as among the most important priests of the state, who, like the priests of nearly all other states, also accomplish objectively useful outcomes in the fields of architecture, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and so forth, but the unifying principle of their activity is its integration within a worldview and an institutional operationality that favors state power. The exceptions to this rule are valuable indeed, just as heretical prophets using the same charismatic performances and some of the same methods as state priests, were valuable to numerous anti-authoritarian rebellions.

If a mass abandonment like those incited by the Guarani prophets were to succeed (e.g., if they had somewhere to go other than into the sea), the results, recorded archaeologically, would probably be identical to the mysterious collapse of so many civilizations: the loss of writing, the abandonment of cities, the dispersal of population.

The difficulties and consequences of state formation are not relegated to prehistory. All states are constantly trying to augment their power, all states are closer to the brink of collapse than they would like to let on. The last decade has been extremely useful for those interested in understanding states, thanks to the spread of popular revolts against every model of state currently in existence.

When the Arab Spring came to Cairo, hundreds of thousands of people organized a horizontal resistance in order to occupy Tahrir Square, defend themselves from the police and paramilitaries, communicate their ideas worldwide, quickly innovate solutions to problems of first aid and healthcare, defend against dangers ranging from tear-gas to sexual assault, sidestep the government’s internet blockades, overcome religious and ethnic divisions, and feed and otherwise sustain their movement. The crisis in government they provoked forced the military dictatorship to allow elections.

When a rightwing religious party began capitalizing on the movement, trying to turn a widespread opposition to authority into an opposition to secular as opposed to religious authority, the military launched a coup and took control of the government again. In any case, it was clear that the rightwing party was in the process of establishing its own dictatorship, albeit through democratic means, similar to the democratic dictatorship ruling in Turkey under the authoritarian Erdogan.

The particular state model in force clearly has a huge impact on our day-to-day life. The kinds of oppression we face, and even the likelihood we have of getting imprisoned or killed, will differ depending on whether our government is a two-party police state democracy like the United States, a multi-party police state democracy like Turkey, a social welfare democracy like Sweden or Germany, a military dictatorship like Egypt, and so on. However, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the similarities between these forms of government far outweigh the differences. In Egypt, the transition between democracy and dictatorship occurred overnight, going both ways. It was not a thousand-year process of evolution but a simple switch in the control strategy of the ruling elite. The vast majority of governmental and economic institutions continued unchanged. And in all of the governments mentioned above, from the military dictatorship to the social welfare democracy, people are locked up in cages, immigrants and other outsiders are occasionally or routinely killed, nature is ravaged, people are not allowed free access to the land, and people who do not submit themselves to economic exploitation are subject to forms of exclusion that range from marginalization and bureaucratic controls to starvation.

In a historical perspective, a sort of anthropological long view, the pretensions of certain states to be different, to be anything other than structural complexes for the accumulation of power, are absurd. At the fundamental level, all states are the same. Thus, the Arab Spring and the many movements it spawned or influenced, from the Rojava Revolution to the plaza occupation movements, became contestations of state authority. Within each of these movements, there appeared a dynamic tension between those currents that wished to use the movement to renew state authority in a different form, and those who wished to abolish such authority completely.

The nonviolent, pro-democracy Color Revolutions forced out ruling parties in Serbia, Ukraine, Lebanon, and other countries. But popular resentment surged anew within a year or two of the new government taking power, fueled by the unbroken continuity of exploitation and disempowerment that sparked the initial rebellions. The message could not be clearer that more elections or another form of government do not address our fundamental powerlessness and the many inequalities that arise from this. The problem is not corruption or lack of democracy or a particular political party, but the very fact we are governed.

Even in the countries of North America and Western Europe where capitalism was successful, according to its own metrics, at producing prosperity, misery reigned. Well before the financial bubble had people talking about crisis, the proliferation of mental health problems, loneliness, and unhappiness—or diseases like obesity and cancer—were out of control. And in each of these lands of opportunity were sizable minorities who slept on the streets, lacked access to healthcare, were controlled by the humiliating social service and welfare bureaucracies, or were locked up in mental hospitals, prisons, juvenile centers, and immigrant detention facilities. And any social movement that tried to question these failings outside of a reformist framework were aggressively marginalized by the media and the police.

The Occupy and plaza occupation movements that broke out in Spain, Greece, the United States, and other countries turned into battlefields between those who wanted to pressure the government for reform and those who wanted to spread the practice of popular self-organization. The latter were repressed by the State, particularly with heavy anti-terrorism operations in the United States and Spain, whereas the former proved to be their own worst enemy, ruining their hopes for change exactly at the point that they got what they wanted. In Greece, a populist, grassroots political party—Syriza—rode the wave of social movements into power and proceeded to institute the most insulting, devastating austerity measures in history, even after losing a popular referendum against the measures. In Spain, the Podemos party arose from the plaza occupation movement and quickly converted into another bureaucratic political party engaged in all the same power plays and either unable to or uninterested in stopping the austerity measures that bankers, technocrats, and centrist politicians were demanding. Every generation can tell the same stories of betrayal, and every political party that at one point claimed to be progressive or revolutionary hides the same sordid history. No party has ever stood in the way of capitalism, yet people keep on voting.

Given state responsibility for colonization, nationalism, and the subjection of minority ethnicities, in the twenty-first century there are still hundreds of movements for national liberation and struggles against occupation. In the previous century, most of these movements aimed to create independent states, unconsciously emulating Western values in order to disprove racist stereotypes or consciously seeking power in Western terms. However, many of these movements have since rejected the goal of state formation, realizing that states are incompatible with freedom. In the dungeons of the democratic United States, revolutionaries locked up for fighting for black liberation—like Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Ashanti Alston—developed anti-state positions. Mapuche communities fighting for the recovery of their land, usurped by forestry and mining corporations with the backing of the Chilean and Argentinian governments, have broken with the leftist movements working to install socialist governments—since not even the socialists have wanted to put a decisive end to colonialism—and now reject the State as a Western imposition and an irremediable tool for domination.

One of the most well-known examples of this pattern comes from Kurdistan. For decades, the Kurds have been fighting against the occupation of their lands by Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. In the eighties and nineties, they followed the well established Marxist-Leninist model of national liberation through the creation of an independent state. Through experience and reflection, however, they came to the conclusion that socialist governments are incapable of breaking with capitalism and all the misery and exploitation it produces, and that states can never be a tool for emancipation because they will inevitably centralize the dominant culture and repress minority cultures. In Rojava and Bakur—the parts of Kurdistan occupied by the governments of Syria and Turkey—the people are currently fighting off the brutal and genocidal imposition of state authority (primarily by Turkey and the Islamic State) and engaging in a dedicated experiment with freedom, building confederal structures of communitarian organization from the ground up.

They are not doing this in a typically anarchist way, because they have not made a complete rupture with preexisting governmental and capitalist institutions, but neither are they trying to change these institutions from within—as so many naïve reformists have done—so much as trying to supplant them with autonomous organizations. The Rojava experiment involves a confederal structure united by an anti-authoritarian ethos. One of the most lively debates of the decade concerns whether they can emancipate themselves with such a structure. So many revolutionary movements have condemned themselves to new kinds of authoritarianism in the past, that skepticism is healthy and inevitable.

A critical position asserts that the structure being used in Kurdistan is pyramidal, and will therefore result in the centralization of power and the formation of a new state. Even some proponents of the model admit it to be pyramidal. In fact, every confederation is a pyramid, uniting local organizations into a single entity through multiple levels of coordination. The Haudenosaunee—the League of the Six Nations—successfully resisted state formation and promoted harmony and reciprocity using such a model for centuries. With the Six Nations, however, the pyramid was inverted, and most of the power was in the local groups. There were also multiple, complementary forms of power that prevented centralization—such as spiritual power and social power, or power in the household and power in times of war—and a deeply rooted autonomy by which delegates could not impose decisions on other community members, and the large-scale coordinating bodies (the “higher” levels of organization in a Western logic) could not impose decisions on the communities. Because of the principle of voluntary association, leaders could at any time be abandoned by their followers.

What allows a pyramid to be inverted or upright? Experience and continued struggle will give the clearest answers, but our study can suggest a number of factors. Is there a strong, anti-authoritarian ethos in the society in question, or is power worshiped? Are leaders mistrusted or adored? Is leadership fragmented and complementary, divided among the fields of spirituality, coordination, sustenance, healing, history, artistry, warfare, conflict resolution, and so forth—allowing everyone to exercise some kind of non-coercive leadership—or is the principle of authority unified, allowing government by a single ruler or ruling body? Is the economy based on local self-sufficiency and shared access to the commons, or on an industrial organization that requires massification and large-scale coordination? A healthy anarchist idealism would suggest pushing for the former against the latter in each of these tensions, or avoiding confederal structures and delegation altogether; however, the struggle in Kurdistan may throw light on how much wiggle room a society has to strike a balance on these diverse organizational questions without creating a new state. And there is also the strategic question of whether, given an armed uprising, we can supplant existing institutions or whether we need to rupture with them unequivocally. Lenin already proved that states do not wither away if we are using them as instruments for change; the Kurds may show whether or not certain state institutions may be left intact while we build grassroots structures.

Like capitalist exploitation and the oppression of dominated ethnicities, climate change is another state effect that governments are incapable of solving. The process of colonization that extended the private property regime across the globe and allowed for intercontinental deforestation was organized by states. The infrastructure of automotive transportation, industrial agriculture, and electricity generation, which are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions, are built and regulated by states (though they are often privatized once governments have forced people to pay for them). The industries responsible for destroying the planet depend on government regulation, police protection, and financing, and form part of an economic complex that is integrally connected to government and that is best viewed as part of the state apparatus, given that all states have conducted their business in both public and private spheres. Through a series of global summits, the State has also attempted to present itself as our savior against the ravages of climate change, but in practice, it is completely inefficient, even unable to moderate ecological disaster where it negatively affects its own interests. For decades, governments have been organizationally defunct, even unable to implement their own measly accords, which by the admissions of their own scientists are inadequate to prevent the crisis. By continuing to trust states as the potential solvers of climate change and mass extinction rather than spreading information and tools designed to enable grassroots direct action (most of which would be illegal), climate scientists are complicit with catastrophe.

We need to stop thinking of the State as a potential vehicle for emancipation. It has never been anything other than a tool for the accumulation of power, and accumulating power is harmful for individuals, for communities, and for the entire planet. A critical appreciation of the effects of state-forming currents within social movements today, an unflinching look at the records of the most powerful states now and in the past, an analysis of the ability of states to respond to critical problems like environmental destruction, genocide, alienation, and exploitation, and an understanding of the history of the State, make it impossible to trust any claim that in the long-run the State can work for the common good. And since states will use any conflict or opportunity to enhance their powers, relying on the State for short-term benefits ensures the proliferation of the problems we seek to overcome. Examples of this pitfall abound, such as the way the reformist sector of the workers’ movement achieved the welfare states that bureaucratized and dismantled the movement, blunting their momentum with hand-outs that broke the self-organization and tenacity of the workers, and enabled the eventual imposition of austerity measures that an alienated population with a middle-class ideology was unable to resist. Seeking reform within the State is like taking out loans to keep the creditor at bay. The State is incompatible with our freedom and well-being.

Continuing to cover up the lines of antagonism that run between us and the institutions of authority can only perpetuate the problem. There is no social contract and there never has been. Our submission to state authority is wholly involuntary because it is the only choice we are given. The states that rule today are the same ones that enslaved our ancestors at sword- or gunpoint. The form that slavery has taken and the mechanism for achieving it has changed drastically, but it is no less effective. In many ways we are worse off today because liberated zones free of state authority are ever more removed or ever more fleeting.

Perhaps the last time that a whole society in the West attempted to organize itself in a horizontal, solidaristic fashion free of State authority, the major institutions—military, Church, landowners, business owners associations, and representative government—drowned their aspirations in blood in an intensifying series of crackdowns that culminated in the Spanish Civil War and subsequent fascist dictatorship, killing half a million people while the neighboring governments watched in silence or lent their support. And every decade in the last century, if not every year, an indigenous people have attempted to reassert their sovereignty, to cast off the State and live according to their traditional forms, only to be evicted, imprisoned, or murdered, adding yet another episode to the largely unwritten chronicle of genocide and colonialism that has accompanied the State since its inception. The most recent peoples to be targeted include the Kanôc, Yanomami, Aché, Karen, Maya, Chakma, Mbuti, and Standing Rock Sioux; and the locations of the atrocities range from Pine Ridge, in the United States, to West Papua.

Open debate is always necessary for the development of our ideas and practices, but in the present context, anyone who claims that states are not antithetical to our freedom cannot be taken seriously. If it really were a question of free debate, of the exchange of ideas, of what was best or what was necessary, why have they massacred us every time we have put stateless forms of social organization into practice? This is one atrocity that all forms of government are guilty of, whether democratic, fascist, or socialist. Given that the debate is in fact not free, the apologists of state mythology in effect become hacks who are simply preaching the official truths they are paid to proclaim, or worse, naïve puppets who repeat for free what they have heard from the professionals.

Honestly expressing the nature of our relationship with the State is the first step to solving the ills that this relationship reproduces. New elections or new government programs cannot even begin to address our lack of freedom. States must be made to answer for their usurpation of our right to organize our own lives, as well as for their unbroken history of genocide, enslavement, tyranny, exploitation, spying, indoctrination, abuse, alienation, warfare, and the despoliation of nature.

Fortunately, we can learn a great deal from the State’s historic evolution. Entering into dialogue with the State is always an error. Societies that sought peaceful, neighborly relations with an encroaching state can be commended for their benevolence but the lesson has by now become clear: there can be no peaceful coexistence with the State. Those who wish to protect or recover their freedom can disparage state representatives, insult them, mock them, ignore them, or silence them, but conversing with them is to mistake them for reasonable human beings rather than the organic masks that an insatiable machine wears in order to extend its power.

We can also learn that states require obedience. Disobedience to the State is therefore an important practice among those who value freedom. The popular heroes that might exemplify an anti-authoritarian ethos are the bandits, the fugitives, the prisoners, the rebels, and the rioters, especially the Robin Hoods and Harriet Tubmans who subvert established hierarchies rather than the mafiosos and Nathaniel Bacons who emulate them. Practices that foster disobedience include refusal to pay taxes, to participate in elections, to collaborate with police investigations, or to perform military service; a further step would be willfully breaking every law that one can get away with, provided the delinquency hurts rulers and owners and obstructs the infrastructures of control and economic accumulation without hurting common people.

In order to rule, states must also organize society to favor legibility—observation, organization, and control from above. Nowadays, rejecting legibility largely means rejecting or abstaining from the private communications technologies that states increasingly use to monitor their subjects; recovering the practices of face-to-face communication rather than mediating all our relationships through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and cell phones; using cash instead of credit cards and even better, developing black market or currency-free economies.

A study of history shows that state authority has a religious aspect: the adoration of leaders and the worship of power itself. People in rebellion must cultivate the contrary, viewing not only politicians but all power-holders and the professionals of parastate institutions (the media, the universities) as torturers, murderers, exploiters, liars, parasites, bullies, snitches, mercenaries, or at best, desperate and unethical opportunists.

We need to learn how to trust again in our own histories and our own capacities for problem solving. An anti-authoritarian history arises from an affinity with the egalitarian “Dark Ages” and not the Golden Ages of opulence above and misery below; with the barbarians and savages and not with the civilizations and empires. It arises from a sympathy with the outlaws and the slaves rather than with the rulers and the generals; with the Indians and not with the cowboys, with the witches and the heretics, and not with the Inquisitors or the reformers. Every historical gaze posits a center; if we truly value freedom over hubris, ours must be rooted among the underclasses who have born the weight of grandeur, and among the marginalized who have ever fled the State’s expanding borders.

Progressive historians will admit the atrocities the State has inflicted, but ignore the possible solutions. The progressive historian bemoans the genocide of indigenous societies, while pretending such societies have already disappeared, and while erecting essentialist, impassable barriers between those who were colonized by state authority before 1492 and those who were colonized after. Yet whether a society succumbed to the Babylonians, to the Romans, to the conquistadors, or to the US Army, colonialism is the shared inheritance of every human being on this planet.

State pretensions to absolute power within a territory, we should remember, are fictive; they are only true to the extent that inhabitants of that territory believe in them. And even now, everywhere in the world, there are people who live in conflict with and sometimes in open negation of state authority. We have not disappeared. We are still fighting.

A reformist historiography that acknowledges the undeniable truth of state atrocities must prevent radical (which is to say, realistic) solutions by instilling victimization. And while it is true that states have done horrible things to us and continue to do horrible things, proportional to how rebellious or how marginalized we are, it is equally true that we have always fought back. We are not victims; many a time the powerful have been afraid of us, and with good reason. Writing of an anti-authoritarian society in Southeast Asia, James C. Scott emphasizes “one ‘tradition’ to which most Lisu proudly point: namely, the tradition of murdering headmen who become too autocratic.” [214] The anarchists of Europe and the Americas, through a practice of revenge for the massacres of thousands of common people demanding freedom, dignity, or mere survival, laid low dozens of monarchs, generals, presidents, and governors. And peoples like the Lakota, the Cheyenne, and the Mapuche have put more than a few genocidal butchers into early graves, ending the atrocities of Custer, Oñez de Loyola, and others. No matter what continent we are from, those who choose to align ourselves with an anti-authoritarian history can be proud: we are the ones who have killed kings.

The reason why states so violently interrupt us every time we try to organize society on the basis of mutual aid and solidarity, or to recover pre-colonial traditions of reciprocity and respect for the earth, is because these horizontal, decentralized methods work. Many a healthy, egalitarian society structured itself in such a way in the past, and the degraded communities of today can choose to do so again, adapting to changing circumstances and to modern needs, because self-organization is an innate human ability. In fact, only by seizing power over our own lives—taking responsibility for ourselves, engaging with our community, and refusing to rule or be ruled—can we intelligently and fairly solve the problems of poverty, alienation, warfare, and the destruction of the planet.

Many anti-authoritarian societies in the past were limited in their resistance by a healthy, libertarian rejection of perpetual warfare. For example, Geronimo, an important war leader of the Apache, often went into combat with just a handful of supporters, because most of his compatriots refused to participate in one war after another. They preferred to seek peaceful solutions with their encroaching neighbors. In hindsight, we can appreciate that peaceful coexistence with a state is impossible, even if we also admire the anti-state practices of the Apache. Avoiding the logic of militarization is key to preventing authoritarianism or politogenesis in our present-day struggles. But we would do ourselves a favor by recognizing that the very existence of the State constitutes an unending war against the planet and all its inhabitants.

The necessity to reject the State transcends ideology. The questions of how we are to free ourselves and what we will do with our freedom remain open, and there exist hundreds of cultural and historical traditions that suggest possible answers, as well as an infinity of utopian possibilities that remain to be explored.

We have the chance, however, to secure one point of common ground that might allow a thousand different worlds to flourish side by side. Just as we refuse to be ruled, we refuse to rule over anyone else. The State is an idea that has been given one chance after another for thousands of years, and the result has always been disastrous. Let us raise our voices against ignorance and complicity until the refusal of domination becomes the common sentiment of all humankind: never again!