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 that enable anti-authoritarian societies to respond to those situations that supposedly cause states to form: warfare, population growth, internal complexification, trade expansions, technological development, et cetera.

Soon it will be time to turn our attention to the relatively rare process of primary state formation: societies that formed states in a stateless world system, without any guiding model or external statist pressures.

But first, I think it will be helpful to dedicate a chapter to the matter of economic accumulation, which some theories posit as the motor of state formation. The very notion of understanding (as distinct from analyzing) the economy as a distinct sphere of social life is problematic from the start. At this point, the illusion has long since become self-confirming, thanks to bureaucracies that produce statistics-based knowledge, patriarchal separations of social life, political expediency promoting an institutional division between the formal and informal areas of the State, and neo-Platonic/Christian dualisms that are still commonplace in scientific thought.

The concept of social war, an elaboration of anarchist theories of power, reveals how purportedly distinct maneuvers of politics and economy actually find their perfect synthesis within a permanent counterinsurgency strategy designed to accumulate power and to protect the State from all the resistance its accumulative process has generated to date.

The accumulation of capital can be usefully analyzed as one of the means a broadly understood State uses to accumulate power, both to provision itself with more resources and to transform the social terrain to facilitate authoritarian control. It can also be read as a special language that members of the elite use to communicate about shared interests. [119] But it only makes sense when understood as a part of the State’s imperative to dominate the social body that gives it its perverse life. (Linebaugh and Rediker give us an indispensable example when they reveal the prototype of the factory to be the transatlantic ship, the perfect model of social control: a designed environment in which the needs of a site of production and the needs of authoritarian domination find a synthesis.)

It becomes apparent, on a long timeline that surpasses Marxism’s narrow optic, that economic accumulation is inconceivable without the hierarchical structures and spiritual values that states and proto-states create. I believe all the available evidence confirms that economic accumulation is never a cause of state formation, although developing an effective strategy of economic accumulation can allow a state to grow rapidly.

How could the production of surpluses cause the formation of new political structures when a surplus cannot exist within a reciprocal economy? In a gift-based economy, bounty and abundance never manifest as surplus, since anything that is not used by an individual or her family is given away. The very concept of surplus does not exist; the pertinent categories would be “gift” and “waste.”

Only a compound of structures of concentrated, coercive and metaphysical power can break the generalized practice of reciprocity that is the foundation of every society, legitimize the concept of quantitative rather than social value, and achieve the institution of alienable property on the grave of the gift economy. Absent those radical social changes, economic accumulation is impossible. The paths by which the former can be accomplished will be explored in the subsequent chapters.

What forms of economic exploitation are available to early states? On the one hand, there is a weak parasitism on preexisting trade and agriculture. This could take the form of a tribute owed to the gods (and dispensed with by a priestly class), to a dominant lineage or clan that has effectively legitimized its claims to the territory and to the ancestors, or to the warrior caste of a neighboring community that has successfully instituted that age-old state-building mechanism, the protection racket. In a clear break with the voluntary character of reciprocity, nonpayment of the tribute can be punished with spiritual ostracism, social exclusion, physical expulsion, or punitive raiding, kidnapping, murder, rape, and other acts of state-building.

On the other hand, early states invariably put their nascent authority to the test in the very kind of social reengineering and legibility-imposing architectures that capitalism, starting a mere five hundred years ago, has come to excel at. (Would it be too awkward to speak of cratoforming? Science fiction has given us the concept of terraforming to speak of the chemical, geological, and climactic transformation of other planets to allow more recognizable forms of colonization to take place. Likewise, cratos—state authority—transforms the environment at an elemental and ecosocial level to favor its own proliferation.)

Few early states were content with exacting tribute and skimming the top off of preexisting economic activities. To varying degrees, they pushed their subjects to augment production and to specialize in a single economic activity and thus become dependent on a distribution network controlled by the State; and they reorganized the social fabric, relocating people and developing new architectures, to cement and intensify these changes. In parallel, they captured slaves and manufactured ethnic or religious barriers to solidarity, allowing them to subject the slaves to levels of exploitation that the citizens would never abide.

Capitalism as a socioeconomic system [120] has thrived on making exploitive forms of economic activity profitable and efficient; however, the attempts of early states to impel economic production are generally marked by immiseration and inefficiency. Productivity, we could say, was until recently far less bountiful than subsistence (and continues to be much less effective, if measured in terms of energy input and ecological drain rather than labor power).

Referring to state-organized agriculture by pre-colonial states in Southeast Asia, Scott says: “They are rarely models of efficient or sustainable agriculture, but they are, and they are intended to be, models of legibility and appropriation.” [121] Comparing early city-states in the Americas with those in Asia, Berezkin points out that hyper-urbanization was not efficient for production but was necessitated by administrative limitations of the state that attempted to monopolize and reorganize economic activity. “When the governmental tradition was firmly established, the proportion of urban population diminished.” [122]

The Baluba, Bakunda, and Balunda states of the Congo basin, discussed in Chapter XI, can practically be considered original states, as they had little or no contact with the states of northern and eastern Africa, and until later only indirect influence from Middle Eastern and Mediterranean states. These states practiced the inalienability of land throughout their existence, and it was not among the first practices given up after European colonization. Economically, the obligations of statehood were equal to or less than those in many non-state societies: tribute and irregular obligatory collective labor. [123] Economically, the state structures supported themselves through foreign trade and thus constituted a minimal economic burden on their subjects. The glue and motor of state organization in these societies belong almost exclusively to what some would label the superstructure—the religious and ceremonial, in a word, symbolic, accouterments to what was supposed to be the material base.

Though it is not always their primary source of sustenance, as in the Congo states, emerging states nearly always try to foment and control trade. The Zapotec and Mayan states centralized and monopolized the prestige sector of the economy (for example, the finest ceramics and the obsidian trade) and allowed other crafts to be decentralized and largely self-organized, though at the bottom of the economic hierarchy they forcibly relocated peasants in settlements dedicated to specialized, intensive agriculture. Curiously, many of the states that most effectively established trade empires organized networks of ceremonial centers in which spiritual and material commerce were overlaid. The Nile and the Andes states, which will be discussed more in a subsequent chapter, were both examples to that effect. The Inca state also assigned different sectors of the economy to specific towns, in a simple strategy that is nonetheless eloquent in demonstrating a synthesis of social control and economic accumulation. In the artificially heterogeneous map of their territory, individual towns were dependent rather than self-sufficient, hyper-specialization augmented innovation and output, and the entire population had to engage in intensified trade, which was more legible and taxable than localized production.

States can organize trade networks, but trade networks themselves do not generate states. The Indus Valley civilization, one of the oldest in the world, is an interesting example. At its height (between 2600 and 1900 BCE), the civilization had a population of some five million people living in half a dozen cities—such as Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—and over a thousand towns and villages. It made up a world system together with its trading partners, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Of these, the Indus Valley civilization was the largest. And in contrast to the other two, it was probably stateless. No solid evidence has been found of kings, priests, armies, temples, or palaces. Some of the largest buildings in the urban centers were public baths; the urban planning, sewage, and hygienic systems were the best in the ancient world; and the relative equality of housing size suggests an egalitarian, non-stratified society. However, some inequalities may have existed, given a high rate of disease and injury found among human remains. The disease can be accounted for by a dense urban population, although it seems that some of the sick and injured received no medical care. With the probable lack of an army, it is unlikely that the Indus Valley civilization practiced any form of slavery extreme enough to result in a high injury rate. Other possible social divisions might have existed between urban citizens (who seemed to be exclusively craftspeople and merchants) and rural inhabitants, the latter possibly excluded from urban healthcare, though the lack of military structures suggests that the rural population traded their surplus more or less voluntarily with the artisans of the towns and cities; without a military, the cities could not subjugate the countryside or do anything worse than impose mildly unfavorable balances of trade.

If this is indeed a case of an anarchic society with a high population density, it might be possible that collectively (and violently) enforced social norms were in place, leading to a decentralized practice of killing authoritarian would-be leaders as well as people engaging in behaviors perceived as anti-social, such as murder, rape, or theft; or that the civilization substituted warfare with ritualized or informal but in any case violent sport competitions (for which there exist numerous precedents among stateless societies).

In any case, there is no positive evidence for social inequality, as the disease and injury rate have multiple possible explanations, and no evidence for the corresponding military, religious, and economic structures that enable social inequality.

Preceding the Indus Valley civilization were farming settlements like Mehrgarh, a small agricultural village going back to 6500 BCE, which between 5500 and 2600 experienced a crafts and trade explosion. Doubtless it was one of multiple villages in the region, allowing us to imagine the following timeline. In a fertile ecosystem of multiple river valleys, neolithic (advanced stone-tool-using) hunter-gatherers eventually adopted sedentary settlements based on the cultivation of multiple grains and other plants, which they domesticated over time to favor characteristics that met their dietary and technical needs. Soon after, they also began domesticating a few animal species. Networks of such settlements, still practicing a good deal of hunting and gathering and still surrounded by pure hunter-gatherers, with whom they may have maintained relations, existed in relative stability for thousands of years, which is to say hundreds of generations, which in human terms might as well be an eternity.

After this eternity, copper working gave rise to bronze technology, a multiplication in the available tools and techniques, and a diversification of crafts, intensifying trade and interdependency within the village network. Increases in trade and in agricultural efficiency led to a population increase, which after another couple thousand years led to the emergence of cities. But in this case, the cities had no religion, no armies, only the most modest forms of warfare, if any, and no rulers. For another seven hundred years, they carried out their crafts and their trade, and organized their cities with some form of council or assembly of inhabitants. Such a degree of stability is rare in state timelines. Constituting another achievement for statelessness, the Indus Valley civilization was in many ways the most technologically advanced of the ancient world, they distributed their wealth in a relatively equal manner, and evidently they did not resort to slavery, religion, or aggressive warfare.

Eventually the cities were abandoned, perhaps due to the environmental impacts or the deterioration in living standards wrought by high population densities, though the towns and agricultural settlements thrived for many centuries more until their eventual conquest by Aryan invaders.

Stateless societies also existed at the heart of one of the most intensive, high-value trade networks in world history, in the Banda islands of the Maluku archipelago. The islanders participated in the spice trade for centuries, occupying an essential productive niche, while preserving their statelessness.

Social organization throughout the Maluku archipelago was localized and largely horizontal, though there was also a council of wealthy male elders—orang kaya—each one representing a district. The majority of local affairs were self-organized, with the orang kaya primarily dealing with, and deriving their power from, the spice trade, which was organized by Malay, Arab, and Chinese traders. Islam arrived peacefully to the islands in the fourteenth century, providing a shared social fabric with the dominant trade networks and helping to unite outside traders with local merchants. Traditional forms of animism continued to be practiced in the interior, away from the ports.

When the VOC (the Dutch East India Company) arrived in the seventeenth century and tried to impose a trade monopoly with unfavorable terms, the islanders revolted and killed the interlopers. After militarily defeating the English in a series of battles, ending the major subversion of their monopoly, the Dutch returned and forced the orang kaya to sign a new treaty. Citing perceived violations of the treaty, the Dutch company instituted a policy of genocide, killing or expelling the natives and repopulating the islands with slaves or forced immigrants. This was the beginning of state authority in the archipelago.

Elsewhere in the East Indies, local societies alternated between states and statelessness until they were definitively colonized. Periods of high-intensity trade availed more resources to state-building projects, but they did not make them inevitable. On the important island of Java, at the center of the pepper trade, we see the same cycles of state-formation and state collapse as we see elsewhere, with mildly hierarchical but stateless societies proving their resilience over centuries. In the end, it was not endogenous processes of class stratification that brought enduring state structures to Java, but military imposition by external powers—first Muslim and then European traders.

The first contender for statehood in Java might be the Tarumanagara kingdom, though the available evidence suggests that the kingdom lacked coercive powers, institutional continuity, and non-charismatic authority (in other words, it might have been what anthropologists classify as a chiefdom and not a state). King Purnawarman was the most famous ruler, his reign lasting from 395–434. The kingdom’s founder was his grandfather, a refugee from India who possibly came from a ruling-class family, who fled the expansion of the Gupta empire and married a woman the founding myths refer to as a local Javanese princess, probably the daughter of a high-status family.

(Curiously, a similar story exists about the founding of Salakanagara, the first Indianized society of West Java. Though no direct information on the society exists, later accounts claim that Salakanagara was founded by an Indian trade emissary who married, again, a local princess. Though impossible to verify, the story suggests the status that serving as the representative of a foreign state can bring, especially in a hierarchical but non-state society. It also shows one of the ways that a state’s control over and promotion of trade can spread the state model.)

Purnawarman was said to have subordinated forty-eight smaller kingdoms, which may have been semi-autonomous clans or communities, each with their own chief. Monumental inscriptions that Purnawarman commissioned suggest that he won the alliance of lesser kings (or chiefs), and that the forty-eight kingdoms were therefore not administrative units under his direct control. The Tugu inscription speaks of “his intelligence and wisdom” and notes that he “has become the royal flag of all kings.” [124] Other inscriptions speak of loyal allies fighting at his side being rewarded with honorable receptions, rather than subordinates under his command simply following orders.

A typical state-building figure, Purnawarman oversaw irrigation works and spread Hinduism, using the Brahmans—the priest class—to legitimate his rule. Two years into his reign, he established a new capital, another common event in state-formation, as a new configuration of power (usually assembled around a skilled statesman) demonstrates and cements its strength by creating a new center and breaking the old networks of power.

Many of Tarumanagara’s later rulers, like the most famous king, bore the Sanskrit word warman in their names, meaning “protector” or “shield.” That symbolism, and the military history of the region, suggests that many hierarchical but non-state societies in the area developed states as a way to protect themselves from more aggressive neighboring states, though just how defensive the Tarumanagara kingdom was is uncertain (monumental inscriptions speak of Purnawarman destroying enemy fortresses, for example). The strategy, in the end, was unsuccessful for the kingdom, though it did allow the elites to wield greater power for a time. Around 650, an invasion by the Srivijaya Empire put an end to the polity. The latter was a Buddhist maritime empire based on Sumatra that profited from trade agreements and cultural ties with China and the Buddhist Pala Empire of Bengal; its trade network stretched all the way to the Islamic Caliphate in the Middle East.

The evidence that Tarumanagara might not have crossed the state threshold is, in part, the lack of evidence or information regarding its subsequent leaders. Few of them erected monuments, as Purnawarman did (the strange obsession with monument-building is nearly universal among states), and while it is unknown whether subsequent leaders came from the same dynasty, it is clear that central authority fractured and faltered, as the capital changed location often. Note that the founding of new capitals tends to be a one-time and not a repetitive event in state formation. A new capital demonstrates that authority has undergone a qualitative change, breaking with the relatively free confederation of chiefdoms or communities that preceded it. A constantly changing capital demonstrates a lack of continuity and stability, values that all states attempt to project.

The kingdom maintained diplomatic relations with China, an important trade partner, and this contact remained stable even after the reign of Purnawarman, though trade networks do not necessarily collapse when states do.

In any case, the Hindu polity that succeeded Tarumanagara was almost certainly not stratified or institutionalized enough to qualify as a state. The Sunda kingdom of western Java hovered around the state threshold from around the seventh to sixteenth centuries. Chinese and later Portuguese merchants described the territory as “lawless” in this time period, and the diplomatic relationship with the Chinese court was not maintained. The capital changed frequently, schismatic centers of power competed with one another, borders were unstable and shifting, and the succession of authority was irregular at best. Within the sphere of influence of the Srivijaya Empire, Sunda guaranteed its survival through alliances and acts of submission to powerful neighbors. Nonetheless, the society was hierarchically organized, and while it sought to preserve its political autonomy, its resistance to neighboring states was not anti-authoritarian.

In the sixteenth century, the Sunda kingdom made an alliance with Portuguese spice traders to protect themselves from the Muslim sultanates that were growing in power in the region. The sultanates were often aided by local elites who used conversion to a new religion as a tool to launch rebellions against the previous rulers. The Portuguese got free access to the highly valued Sunda pepper, but they only profited off the alliance for five years before the Sultanate of Demak expelled them, in 1527, and took over the key port of Sunda Kelapa, which they renamed Jayakarta. It subsequently became part of the Banten Sultanate. From that point on, the territory was the property of one state or another, each fighting to control the trade networks.

In the early-seventeenth century, Prince Jayawikarta, a vassal of the Sultanate of Banten, granted permission to the English and Dutch to build trading houses in the port city. He tried to play the European powers off one another to keep either one from gaining too much power, but in doing so lost the support of Banten, which by that time was fully in the pocket of the Dutch. The Dutch VOC razed Jayakarta and built their regional capital, Batavia, on its ashes, banishing the local population and importing Chinese and other non-Javanese to populate the area to prevent an insurrection.

The initial strategy of the Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch colonists was to occupy and control preexisting trade hubs, as when the Portuguese conquered Malacca in 1511. But as their power and the extension of their network expanded, their activities reached a whole new scale, as the VOC operation at Jayakarta/Batavia illustrates. No longer content to profit off of or even monopolize trade, they began to reengineer the terrain, destroying and remaking entire societies, in the symmetrical interests of social control and productivity. The Dutch East India Company was peerless in this regard.

A chartered company, the first with publicly traded stocks, and—within a few decades of its foundation—the richest company in the world, the VOC was not merely a business interest. It constituted a politogen, even a state in itself. By 1669, it commanded over two hundred ships, a quarter of them warships, and ten thousand soldiers. The Dutch state had granted the VOC law-making, war-making, and judicial authority. It founded colonies that proved to be fully functioning, if not fully independent, states that lasted for centuries. It deported and imported populations to build new societies dedicated to a productive economy, it annihilated horizontal communities, and toppled preexisting local states. It was not, however, omnipotent, as it lost several wars against the most powerful Southeast Asian states, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, and Ming dynasty China.

One of the VOC’s most groundbreaking achievements was to organize, practically alone, an intercontinental cycle of accumulation that was vital to the emergence of global capitalism and the modern state. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe produced practically nothing that the economically advanced societies of Asia wanted. Only Spain and Portugal had any abundance of gold and silver, so to avoid unfavorable if not impossible balances of trade, the VOC initiated intra-Asian trade circuits in order to fund its spice shipments to Europe. Securing an exclusive trade contract with the isolationist Japanese shogunate for two hundred years, the VOC got silver and copper from Japan for silk and porcelain from China, which the company acquired with cotton from India, opium from Bengal, and tea from Ceylon. The revenue and the trade goods generated from this circuit allowed them to acquire the spices in the Indies that sold for such astronomical prices in Europe.

But the VOC quickly learned not to let short-term considerations predominate. They stockpiled spices and made sure not to let prices get too high, to keep commercial ventures aiming to break their monopoly from becoming too profitable. And in their position as both a state body and a trade company, they learned to win the wars with commerce that they could not win with bullets. The opium trade to China provided an important example of how economics—and addiction—could bring to its knees a country that European powers had been unable to defeat militarily. Their need for military and state-making power, however, was evident from the very beginning as a prerequisite for any economic accumulation.

The history of the Minoans and the Mycenaeans suggests some basic parallels with that of the Sunda and VOC. The Minoans, more accurately referred to as the Cretan civilization, were in all probability a stateless people who organized an important trade network spanning the eastern Mediterranean over more than a thousand years. They were a peaceful society with a minimum of defensive infrastructure and no record of involvement in offensive warfare. They were, if not matriarchal, non-patriarchal, with almost exclusively female deities and female or trans priestesses.

The Cretan civilization is best known for its large ceremonial centers, which archaeologists termed “palaces,” the most famous one located at Knossos. However, these palaces were not the seats of political rulers, and in fact there is no evidence of such rulers. The palaces served as warehouses, redistribution centers, collective housing for priestesses and administrators, archives, and religious sites. In the Cretan society, all of these functions were probably mixed to the point of being indistinguishable.

Scientists and historiographers have proposed these palaces as the linchpin in an exploitative economy, wherein the agricultural surplus was hoarded and redistributed to the upper classes. And while archaeological evidence does suggest economic stratification, with artisans dealing in more high-prestige crafts enjoying more wealth than farmers and herders, this vision is probably inaccurate and almost certainly unfaithful to how the Cretans themselves saw their “palace economy.” On the one hand, the Cretan diet was too rich, too diversified to suggest a hyper-exploited, enslaved lower class. Put simply, enslaved workers do not have the resources for a healthy diet, and they lack the time to dedicate to multiple forms of subsistence. Nor is there evidence of a Cretan army or other mechanisms capable of imposing the sort of work-or-starve, blackmail economy so common in other city-states. The very diversity of Cretan food production (spanning multicrop agriculture, apiculture, silvaculture, aquaculture, fishing, and hunting, a diversity that would be impossible for a weak state to surveil and control), paired with the lack of evidence of a police or military structure makes the proposal of a coerced or dependent peasant population ludicrous. In the worst case, merchant-priests controlling the palaces might have been able to impose an unfavorable exchange rate making it difficult or impossible for the peasants to acquire luxury goods, but the peasants would still have been more or less self-sufficient, autonomous, and healthy.

The Cretan civilization did have a written language, at the time a common sign of state authority, although nearly all the decoded fragments of Linear B are simple trade records and lists of resources, with a few religious references thrown in. Universally, early states with written languages used the written record to preserve laws, chronicles, and accounts of the power and grandeur of their supreme leaders.

In practice, the palace economy was probably a network of religious centers where farmers, artisans, and merchants brought their produce or their trade goods, sometimes in the spirit of a gift, an offering to the gods that would be redistributed, and sometimes in the spirit of exchange. Mask-wearing priestesses represented the gods in important ceremonies, anonymizing spiritual power rather than concentrating it in any individual or family. They also specialized in the occult knowledge, like math and writing, which allowed them to administer a large trade network.

The symbolic importance of Knossos was so great that the warlike and patriarchal Mycenaeans, who occupied Crete around 1420 BCE, left it intact, apparently using it as a cultural and bureaucratic center, even as they burned the rest of the Cretan palaces. They were unable to build something as grandiose, so they kept it, ostensibly in order to co-opt its spiritual and cultural power and perhaps also as a monument to their conquest. For centuries, a flourishing trade network did not cause the Cretans to develop a state. It was, in fact, a less technologically sophisticated society that espoused patriarchal and militaristic values distinct from those of the Cretan civilization that succeeded in bringing state authority to the island. The Mycenaeans did their best to take over the eastern Mediterranean trade network. Once again, economic accumulation was a prize that a preexisting state captured, and not the cause of state-formation.

Two thousand years later in Central Europe, the tribal centers of sedentary agriculturalists were often located in places of symbolic, spiritual importance. These settlements were fortified over time, some of them giving rise to towns between the eighth and tenth centuries that occupied an important productive niche in preexisting trade networks. They were sites of production in agriculture, animal husbandry, metallurgy, construction, fortification, and jewelry making. “These newly emerging urban centers, however, appeared independently from the state-formative process and their existence does not indicate the necessary occurrence of state societies.” In the two centuries prior to the emergence of these towns, the construction of both forts and open settlements had increased 50 percent, creating a density more favorable to trade. [125]

The Polanie state that emerged between the ninth and tenth centuries abandoned many of the old tribal centers early in the process of politogenesis. A centralized confederation of chiefs was able to aggressively redraw the social map in order to favor administrative concerns and a centralized military strategy. In other words, short-term economic concerns were trumped by politico-military concerns that allowed a new economic paradigm to be born. The old, abandoned centers had been founded on a spiritual or economic logic, e.g. sacred gathering places and good settlement locations close to well watered fields or fertile pastures. The new settlements established by the Polanie state were fortified administrative-military centers at regular intervals (about every fourteen kilometers).

The new towns displayed a bimodal division: a heavily fortified section for the ruler and nobility, and a moderately fortified section for merchants, artisans, and minor knights. The fact that the nobility reserved for themselves not only buildings of greater monumental status but also greater military effect demonstrates an antagonism not only between the inhabitants of these settlements and outsiders (exploited peasants as well as hostile foreign polities) but also between the middle and upper strata.

The artisans, in fact, were initially prisoners of a sort, forcibly relocated to privileged, central towns that state planners wanted to turn into centers of artisanal production. These towns tended to be the seats of political authority, and the craftspeople made to settle there included war-captives as well as compatriots brought in from their villages or towns of origin.

At a stroke, the emerging class of military administrators galvanized processes of economic production and accumulation, and also monopolized them. Their control over the growth in economic activity allowed them to pay more retainers and field larger armies, as well as to expand their construction works. In all likelihood they regularly invaded their neighbors to “provide a constant growth of labor and keep the positive balance between the growth of population and food production.” [126]

A hundred years into this process, “multicomponent forts with monumental architecture, surrounded by a number of open habitations […] named by the Medieval chronicles as sedes regni principals—the seats of royal representatives” appeared at intervals of twenty-five to thirty kilometers, “usually on the long distance trade trails.” By the end of the tenth century there were six of these regional capitals, none of which were distinguished as the exclusive seat of the monarch, suggesting that increasing centralization still had not overcome some kind of confederal equality among the nobility. [127]

To summarize, a growing population and the interrelated improvements in agricultural and metallurgical techniques, which probably arrived in Central Europe as decentralized (one might say “anarchic”) innovations, together with a context of neighborly warfare, provided an opportunity for hierarchical, non-state chiefdoms in Central Europe to develop a state. The pathway, following well-known models practiced by the neighboring Germanic states, involved convincing preexisting nobility and local leaders to centralize their power, first in some form of confederation, to administer construction, production, and warfare. This state-building activity spurred a cycle of accumulation and a paradigm shift in the economic mode of production, seen not only in the quantitative increase in trade and population (outstripping the earlier population increase) and the qualitative improvement in agricultural and metallurgical techniques, but also in the (re)appearance of such significant and game-changing elements as currency.

Significantly, all the chiefdoms and tribes in the region experienced the conditions identified with the first stage (pertaining to the seventh and eighth centuries), and the archaeological record shows that they also increased their participation in trade, fortification construction, and aggressive warfare in the ninth and tenth centuries, but only one of these groups, the Polanie, created a state. Presumably, all of these societies were culturally and economically similar. They had the same material opportunities, and they tolerated the existence of elites; these elites, in turn, applied hierarchical solutions to social problems, increasing their wealth and carrying out aggressive warfare. Still, for politogenesis to occur, something else was needed: an ambitious plan to reorganize society. State-formation was a strategic act of elite will.

The Polanie state was the most proactive force in establishing a new economic mode based on monetization, competitive rather than reciprocal trade, alienated production, noble prerogatives, and accumulation. And the new mode of production, always closely administered and monopolized by the emerging state, fueled and financed the political class as they transitioned from proto-state, to early state, to a centralized monarchy. In other words, we have a complex process with demographic, cultural, political, commercial, and technological factors all interrelating simultaneously, but among these multiple threads, the first to develop self-consciousness and a strategic projectuality, the first to become a proactive agent capable of pushing the other threads in a given direction, was the political class that built up a state around themselves.

Confirming the social war concept of anarchist theory, the kind of economic accumulation that would eventually give rise to capitalism was originally conceived by the political class as a strategic means for increasing their power, another maneuver in their unifying strategic activity: warfare. In its origins and in its essence, the economy is but one moment in the war the State constantly wages against society.