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.)

All in the Family: Kinship and Statehood
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 charismatic, m... (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.)

The Modern State: A Revolutionary Hybrid
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 and backing it u... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

They Ain’t Got No Class: Surpluses and the State
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 enab... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)

Chiefdoms and Megacommunities: On the Stability of Non-State Hierarchies
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, remaining intact... (From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)