“And perhaps solving the mystery of the birth of the State might also permit us to clarify the conditions of the possibility […] of its death.”
—Pierre Clastres
“Acudid los anarquistas
empuñando la pistola hasta el morir
con petróleo y dinamita
toda clase de gobierno
a combatir
¡y destruir!”
—“Arroja la Bomba”
Spanish anarchist song composed in prison in 1932, popularized in the revolution of 1936
Dedicated to Harold H. Thompson and Kuwasi Balagoon, who died in the dungeons of the State after decades of confinement, to Matías Catrileo, shot down in the struggle to regain his people’s l... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
I. Take Me to Your Leader: The Politics of Alien Invasion
It is now a commonplace that colonizing states appoint leaders to horizontal societies they are trying to absorb through trade or warfare. This is not particular to one stage or type of state formation, but state formation as a constant activity. British colonizers bestowed titles on local intermediaries from Africa to Central Asia. US and Canadian occupiers set up tribal governments. Bourgeois states used repression and subsidies to encourage hierarchical organization in the labor unions of the workers’ movement. The media appoint spokespeople to heterogeneous rebellions.
Writing about Southeast Asia, James C. Scott explains the process:
Every state with a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
II. Ze Germans: A State-Making Technology
In the year 983, the Slavic inhabitants of that forested plain south of the Baltic sea, where the river Spree winds past a series of placid lakes, the spot where a city known as Berlin now stands, rose up against their masters. The Slavs, known as Wends, were ruled by a Germanic elite who imposed on their subjects Christianity, military discipline, feudal obligations such as forced labor and the tithe, and a culture of reverence for divine and secular authority. The Wendish rebellion was successful, as were many rebellions against early states. The population killed off or drove out all the German nobles and priests, and for the next century and a half, lived as pagans, stateless and free.
... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
III. Save Me from Yourself: The Statist Spread of Salvation Religions
“Adoption of the [state] model was tantamount to adoption of Christianity, which legitimized the political order of the state.” [54]
The parastatal Catholic Church had attached itself to the Roman Empire, using that structure’s last centuries to spread the religion considerably, converting the elites and then the peasants of barbarian societies. When the empire fell, the Church held on to the dream. Even where it was too weak to constitute an imperial state, it spread a common cultural language that favored state formation and preached obedience to authority. Over centuries, it served as a centralized network to mobilize resources for state... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
IV. Sleeper States and Imperial Imaginaries: Authority’s Afterlife and Reincarnation
The anthropological and evolutionary typology of band, tribe, chiefdom, state does not accurately describe the historical existence of states and stateless societies. Many bands have been post-state groupings whose organizational structure helps them resist capture and inclusion by neighboring states. “Tribes” as classically defined tended to be the projections and inventions of states (or as Korotayev documents in the Yemeni highlands, evolutions of chiefdoms), whereas societies defined as “chiefdoms” could be stable, mildly hierarchical megacommunities that actively constituted state alternatives rather than stepping s... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
V. The Modern State: A Revolutionary Hybrid
States can be conservative—or even lazy—institutions that seek stability and develop progressively when impelled to do so by resistance or adversity. European states stumbled upon a great advantage in the process of developing biopower and colonialism to fuel themselves, arguably as a response to a series of crises of governance. To the extent that capitalism provoked so much resistance and instability, any state seeking to ride this new force would constantly have to adapt, plot, spy, mobilize, militarize, and grow. Capitalism inaugurated an unending social war that has constituted a ceaseless learning process for states.
Rephrasing an essentially anarchist hypothesis [7... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
VI. Zomia: A Topography of Positionality
It is worth quoting the closing passages of Tacitus’s Germania in full:
Here Suebia ends. I do not know whether to class the tribes of the Peucini, Venedi, and Fenni with the Germans or with the Sarmatians. The Peucini, however, who are sometimes called Bastarnae [around present-day Slovakia or western Ukraine], are like Germans in their language, manner of life, and mode of settlement and habitation. Squalor is universal among them and their nobles are indolent. Mixed marriages are giving them something of the repulsive appearance of the Sarmatians. The Venedi [around present-day Belarus] have adopted many Sarmatian habits; for their plundering forays take them over all the woode... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
VII. Chiefdoms and Megacommunities: On the Stability of Non-State Hierarchies
For a long time, Western anthropologists accepted Elman Service’s neo-evolutionist sequence of four stages for classifying social development, the pinnacle being the state, of course. The penultimate stage, the chiefdom, was generally argued to be an unstable political formation, lending more credence to the assumption that state evolution was inevitable, in this instance due to the inconveniences and imperfections of the previous stage of political organization.
In recent years, this sequence has been problematized; for one, because chiefdoms in many parts of the world have proven highly resilient in resisting the imposition of state power, re... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
VIII. They Ain’t Got No Class: Surpluses and the State
So far, we have focused on processes of secondary state formation: societies that formed states within world systems where other states had already been instituted, and thus constituted a model and an influence. We have begun to appreciate how a society’s prior attitude towards authority has a critical impact on how it responds to state influence—whether with resistance or imitation. Placed in the same adverse situation, a society with anti-authoritarian, cooperative, and reciprocal values will find an anti-authoritarian solution, while a society that values hierarchy may likely form a state. We have also seen a number of non-state models for social evolution th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
IX. All in the Family: Kinship and Statehood
Throughout a broad swath of human history, the accumulation of status was more feasible than the accumulation of material wealth. It is possible that in some, if not many, societies, the family structure evolved to enable the inheritance of status and charisma before it was put in use to facilitate the inheritance of property. In fact, alienable property (the liberal “private property”) long postdates familial descent groups, therefore the kind of property passed on by the family would be usufruct property, the right to use a piece of land belonging to the community. The two kinds of inheritance potentially went hand in hand. A high-status family claiming descent from a charism... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
X. Building the Walls Higher: From Raiding to Warfare
“The accumulation of population by war and slave-raiding is often seen as the origin of the social hierarchy and centralization typical of the earliest states.” [165]
We have already looked at the process of militarization as a motor of state-formation, but I think it is also necessary to underscore that the role of warfare can be overstated. Randolph Bourne was not exaggerating when he said “war is the health of the state.” [166] Nonetheless, warfare does not necessitate state formation and states do not need to favor military over nonmilitary expansion.
The conquest state model that has cropped up so frequently in this study is, let’s ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
XI. Staff and Sun: A New Symbolic Order
Just as we have seen that status accumulation was more important than economic accumulation in the social hierarchies that developed into states, symbolic power was a question of vital importance for proto-states. Lacking a reliable degree of coercive power, the earliest states and the non-state hierarchies that preceded them had to concern themselves with the centralization and expansion of symbolic production, in order to unify and pacify their subjects, supplant the social practice of reciprocity, engineer a rupture with the old model of order, and establish a new model of authority.
The idea that “political power flows from the barrel of a gun” is largely true in a modern... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
XII. A Forager’s Mecca: Dreams of Power
On the fertile plains and river valleys north and west of the Black Sea—the corridor through which agriculture entered the European subcontinent—the stories of some of the first agricultural societies shed light on both the effects of agriculture on society, and on the history of the State. The Cucuteni-Trypillian culture existed from 4800 to 3000 BCE in the area that is now western Ukraine, Moldova, and eastern Romania. They practiced an agriculture based on the cultivation of wheat, rye, and peas. Women carried out textile and pottery manufacturing, and men hunted and herded, especially cattle. This culture built some of the largest settlements in the world of that time, inc... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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 weake... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
[1] Representing the conservative end of the academic spectrum, with narratives that are frequently Eurocentric and state-privileging, we have the collection edited by Grinin, Bondarenko, et al. They acknowledge that “nowadays postulates about the state as the only possible form of political and sociocultural organization of the post-primitive society, about a priori higher level of development of a state society in comparison with any non-state one do not seem so undeniable as a few years ago. It has become evident that the non-state societies are not necessarily less complex and less efficient” (Bondarenko, Grinin, and Korotayev, “Alternatives of Social Evolution” in The Early State, its Alternatives and Analogs, e... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
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Anonymous. “Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the #SpanishRevolution.” CrimethInc. June 2011. http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/barc.php.
Anonymous. “From 15M to Podemos: The Regeneration of Spanish Democracy and the Maligned Promise of Chaos.” CrimethInc. March 3, 2016. http://crimethinc.com/texts/r/podemos/.
Arrig... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)
