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 stones to state-formation. Rather than existing as discrete ethnic units, societies tend to be differentiated articulations of cultural, socio-economic organization that only function as part of an interconnected regional or global system.

From an anarchist standpoint, there is something else lacking in the evolutionary typology. Namely, there have been some societies that, although in organizational terms may be defined as chiefdoms, already contain within them more than just the first steps of state formation, and therefore act as vehicles for state-formation rather than independent and resistant hierarchies.

Quite apart from their organizational reality, states include a projectual dimension (as we have seen in Chapter II) and an imaginary dimension (Chapter III), that are wholly real, even though they must be relegated to the immaterial sphere according to an erroneous dichotomy (and sometimes dialectic) once in vogue. A more nuanced, realistic version of this dialectic, such as the Foucault- and ethnology-influenced method of history espoused by Jacques Le Goff, would describe these two dimensions as aspects of a society’s mentality, “‘that which changes least’ in historical evolution.” [64] However, within this framework, a mentality without the institutions, economies, and social structures to support it can only be understood as archaic, vestigial. Such a mentality is nothing but a residue of the hard structures that have presumably evolved and left it behind. Even though an unsupported mentality indisputably constitutes part of the social reality, it lacks a claim to reality because within a progressive framework it belongs to the past, it constitutes a dead-end, whereas the supposedly more evolved structures represent the only way forward. Even if this view is not the aim of historical ethnology, it is still the likely outcome of the evolutionary worldview built into and only partially excised from ethnology, history, and all other Western scholastic disciplines. In 1974, Pierre Clastres wrote how “behind the modern formulations, the old evolutionism remains, in fact, intact.” [65] The same observation could be made today. I don’t think the intellectual culture of scientists can be completely purged of this pervasive mythology as long as the interconnected economies, institutions, structures, and parallel mentalities (of both popular and elite culture) are infused with an implicitly supremacist and accumulative progressivism.

(Many academics from the Early State Project, for example, though they recognize the basic precepts of multilinear evolution, the historical commonplace of state failure, and the possibility of a stateless complex social organization, still frequently use a temporal language that implicitly identifies the state as the most advanced form of organization. And how could they entirely purge this component of their ideology, even once they have the capacity to recognize it as erroneous and mythological, when the only economic opportunities for Early State scientists, aside from teaching at universities, is to advise dominant states on effective methods for propping up failed states, from Somalia to Iraq. And as for the teaching posts or museum jobs, these are hardly refuges of pure research, as the number and quality of such posts is directly related to the profitability with which the discipline can be applied outside of academia.)

To shed a little light on the importance of the projectual and imaginary dimensions, let us turn to early medieval Europe. Because of the strong pretensions of post-Roman European elites to be commanders of states, it took a long time for modern scientists and historians to recognize that by their schema, they were actually looking at chiefdoms and not states. [66] In other words, the European term had connotations of sophistication, and thus statehood, whereas non-Western terms communicate primitivism, and thus chiefdoms.

According to an evolutionary analysis based on organizational complexity and territoriality, many European kings of the early Middle Ages were “in fact” chiefs. While accurate within its own terms of analysis, this view is erroneous for not giving importance to the imaginary organization of these societies.

Before identifying a few significant aspects of the collapse and reemergence of the State in Western Europe, it would do well to problematize a crucial element of social scientists’ definition of the state: its territoriality. Control of a territory rather than the unification of specific kinship groups seems to be a universal and essential feature of the state. Yet many social scientists have uncritically taken state pretensions of their own territoriality at face value, perhaps because they share the state’s ideology and believe in the projection of its legitimacy. As Scott conveys in his discussion of “Mandala states,” a state’s territoriality is often fictive, imaginary, and projectual. [67] In other words, states throughout history, up until today, do not exert control over the entirety of the space (and here we can consider both social and geographical space) they claim to dominate. The functional aspect, then, are elite claims. A state’s territoriality resides most perfectly in its rulers’ imaginary. What other aspects of state formation are produced by the imagination? Let us return to the example at hand.

The Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476, and the politogens with some direct connection to it (for example, Germanic war leaders who had served in the Roman military) were only able to subject a portion of the old empire to new state authority. Before 600, there were few polities, besides that of the Franks, the Saxons, and the Longobards, that could boast both a significant territory and a political structure worthy of classification as a state. The economic and organizational basis of statehood dissolved throughout most of Europe. Cities declined, private ownership of land disappeared, horticulture became the predominant economic activity and, as Western Europe reforested even hunting became important again. Elite hierarchies were often redundant, overlapping, and ambiguous, lacking multiple levels of administration, a uniform legality, or a defined chain of command. The Church and the courts of warrior-kings worked fundamentally in alliance but also in competition, their hierarchies overlapping and often conflicting, a sort of inefficient double-measure to tie the population down in the absence of any unified measure. The land was divided into a patchwork of territories promising their obedience to multiple masters who competed endlessly, working out a pecking order that remained ambiguous for centuries. On an organizational and economic level, the system was similar to that of the Waha in central Africa, [68] although the latter developed in completely different ways, preventing state formation for centuries whereas Western European societies continuously climbed that hill no matter how many times they fell down. In contrast, what has been described as Chinese or Japanese feudalism differs strongly from European feudalism in terms of organization and property relations, as hierarchies were unitary and well defined, with a relatively unambiguous chain of command and source of sovereignty and legality. The point of commonality was a partially self-sufficient peasant class who had to surrender a part of its produce in order to maintain access to the land.

The symbolic and imaginary connections to antiquity that persisted through the European Middle Ages were not merely a vestigial mentality, but a means of preserving statist organization on an imaginary plane, given its unfeasibility on the material plane, and a code or diffuse instruction manual for eventually recovering state formation, a sort of trail of breadcrumbs by which Hansel and Gretel could find their way out of the forest again.

Early medieval society was also characterized by a resurgent tripartite division that was universal at one point or another among Indo-European peoples. This division consisted of “oratores, bellatores, and laboratores, or clergy, warriors, and workers.” [69] We should note, as Le Goff does with other terms and with another point in mind, that the linguistically inappropriate but semantically accurate translation of laboratores is “improvers.” These were not toilers but landowners or independent farmers—those with their own land who were rarely self-sufficient labor-wise but who made use of additional seasonal labor, eventually giving rise to the post-feudal class of landless or salaried peasants. Some of the techniques and instruments credited to these improvers were the product of their own initiatives and others no doubt were observed among and stolen from the peasants, who in their unregulated labor time experimented with labor-saving methods, bounty-amplifying devices, and creative, impressive, gratifying gadgets. We are thinking here of things like crop rotation, more extensive and less labor-intensive irrigation, asymmetrical plows, water wheels, and so forth.

These improvers were not primarily the ones who toiled to implement and manage their improvements, though many were probably poor enough that they had to work alongside their helpers, and some perhaps prefigured the Protestant work ethic by taking part and pleasure in the manual aspect of their labor. However, the early medieval attitude among the literate strata towards work—unambiguously negative—leaves no direct record of their enthusiasm.

What is curious is that these improvers were heretics, according to the letter of Church law, for disputing God’s control of time, his prescription of asceticism, and his admonishments against the glorification or adornment of the earthly world; yet they were pious supporters of the Church and often won its admiration. We might surmise that the improvers simply tread roughshod over Church doctrine because it was the only way to increase their wealth and their power relative to the other castes. If this were the case, the ecclesiastical authorities would have treated them the same way they treated other heretics, or the way they treated the invisible fourth class, the peasants who carried out most of the actual labor. Church complicity with the improvers in the subversion of their own doctrine reveals a shared dream, a quest for a greater glory not present in the social structures of the day, and whose attainment would require the total transformation or liquidation of those structures.

By the time the laboratores established their hegemony, the tripartite system from which they arose had already disappeared. By advancing a new, scientific [70] conception of time and forcing the Church to reverse or at least modify its doctrines on labor, wages, usury, and the honor or dishonor inherent to a long list of professions, this caste helped create the surplus, the discipline, and the instruments that not only allowed the reemergence of the State, but of a more powerful state animated by a productive rather than parasitic logic.

The oratores placed limitations on the bellatores, creating the rudiments of a culture of internal peace and cooperation within Europe, in order to assert their divine importance over the more actionable power of the warriors, their obvious rivals in the tripartite system. The priests’ activism as peace brokers also prevented their potential domain from being broken up into a collection of bickering fiefs each dominated by warlords. They supported the development of martial powers, as a way to increase their own power, but they also worked to see that those powers were subordinated to a political hierarchy legitimated by the Church rather than remaining in the hands of a knightly caste that could easily come to resent the Church. Hence the many days on which war making was forbidden, and the preeminent role of the Church as mediator. Elite historians, however, can easily forget the important role that peasants played in pressuring the Church to limit the power of the warlords, and thus assuage the ill effects that warfare had on the poor.

As for the heresies of work and wealth, the Church strove to have holy days respected, when many peasants apparently wanted to keep working. Material independence free from centralized spiritual values threatened the entire social hierarchy. So the Church rallied to make sure the improvers and laborers frequently left the fields in order to come pray, celebrate, and receive their moral instructions. When material poverty was the only option, the Church preached the holiness of poverty and urged independent-minded peasants to sustain themselves with spirituality. When the accumulation of wealth became a social possibility, and most importantly when the political structures to monopolize that wealth were coming into place, the Church began to urge the laborers to work harder, and they began sacralizing the values of their upper crust, the improvers. Even before the Protestant Reformation, wealth and accumulation had become signs of godliness. Although this change may have contradicted the clergy’s narrow caste interests, it corresponded to the imaginary of a resurgent state.

The three castes competed for relative power in the evolving hierarchies, but at a more fundamental level they cooperated. In a typical chiefdom, certain castes resist the push by specific power-holders towards statist lines of development. The resurgence of the state in Europe cannot be chalked up to a traditionalist allegiance to mentalities and symbologies of the defunct Roman state. Too much time had passed for a memory, largely faded, to retain such power, and besides, the ideation of control, despite the conservatism of mentalities, was highly adaptable throughout the Middle Ages, eventually giving rise to a state model almost entirely distinct from the Roman predecessor, even as Renaissance statists claimed a direct pedigree in antiquity and opened the way for capitalism by restoring “Roman law,” which allowed private ownership of land.

The key to this paradox lies in the imaginary. Even though the state fell on a material plane, European societies did not become tribes or chiefdoms because, in most areas, state organization was maintained in the imaginaries of dominant castes. Those communities that overthrew such castes, such as the heretics of Stedinger, the pagan rebels of the Spree and those of the nascent Polish state, put down by Kazimierz the Restorer, the free peasant communes of the Slavic hinterlands, and the Bogomils of the Balkans, had to be dealt with militarily by neighboring states or proto-states, because they had demonstrably rejected the statist imaginary. The fervor of the crusades against them, and the way they were so specifically and enthusiastically targeted, finds no parallel in the contemporary wars between Christian proto-states. The wars between hierarchical societies that held true to the dream of statehood were fraternal, whereas the wars against these rebellious anti-authoritarian societies were wars of colonization and extermination.

The statist mentality of the European Middle Ages was no vestige. It was a dynamic plane in which new state models could be developed and tested, nourished by a non-material continuity with past states. European statists did not reinvent the wheel, or start from scratch after a Dark Age, even though the state they reformulated after centuries of statelessness was a wholly new model of state. Theirs was the projectual state.

The available sources do not permit us to know if there existed a similar imaginary among priestly and other castes in the stateless interregnum between the Tiwanaku and Inca states in the Andes, but I would suggest it as another historical period in which a statist imaginary may have been at work. In any case, I can affirm that the overthrow of the Tiwanaku state is certainly an episode in the imaginary of anti-authoritarian indigenous rebels today. [71]