Worshiping Power : An Anarchist View of Early State Formation

Notes
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, edited by Leonid E. Grinin, Robert L. Carneiro, Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Nikolay N. Kradin, and Andrey V. Korotayev [Volgograd, Russia: Uchitel Publishing House, 2004], 5). Note that while questioning the unilineal statist mythology, the idea... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Bibliography
Bibliography Abu-Lughod, Janet. Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Ahern, Emily. Chinese Ritual and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Algarra Bascón, David. El Comú Català. Barcelona: Potlatch Ediciones, 2015. 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/. Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long 20th Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of our Times. New York: Verso, 2010. Bakunin, Mikhail. “Rousseau’s Theory of the State.” 1873. (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 13 : From Clastres to Cairo to Kobane: Learning from States
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-c... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 12 : A Forager’s Mecca: Dreams of Power
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, including cities of up to fifteen thousand people. They invented the oldest known proto-writing system in the world, manufactured and traded, and lived in pit houses that gave way over time to above-ground clay houses with thatched roofs. (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chapter 11 : Staff and Sun: A New Symbolic Order
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 state, but in early states, though examples abound of political power descending from the edge of a blade, it most commonly flowed from the gods. Symbolic production was, above all, a religious activity, to the point that it bec... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Take Me to Your Leader: The Politics of Alien Invasion
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 ambitions to control p... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Zomia: A Topography of Positionality
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 wooded and mountain... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

“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 land, and to all those who continue fighting, inside and out. Special t... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Building the Walls Higher: From Raiding to Warfare
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.” 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.” 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 not forget, a model of secondary ... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Ze Germans: A State-Making Technology
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. It requir... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)