Recently I had the opportunity to read some anarchist literature (Zerzan, Ocalan, Bookchin, Clastres…) which got me wondering on the topic of State and its birth. In this short post I’ll try to sum-up different views on this topic. I hope this is amusing for you, but it’s primarily for my own use, to clear up my head and find structure in the chaos.

The birth myth of the State

As an anarchist, one question you might find yourself asking is: when did this sharade we call State started?
One common answer is that as human tribes became less nomadic, invested more energy in agriculture and grew to considerable number, a bit of beaurocracy had to be implemented. The details vary, but this is the recipe: you stuck to a place, grow some corn, breed considerably, and what you get is a hierarchical structure layered in classes with a tributary system that favors those on top.

The correct genesis probably doesn’t exist. No one believes that every state developed from the same exact mechanics. In our quest for abstraction we encounter three main points: 1. hunter-gatherers became farmers (why can’t there be a nomadic state?) 2. religion played some part in dividing the community into classes (no God no masters!) 3. the state solves an organizational problem (managers being managers)

This is where anthropologists start to creep in: can we infer the life of our primitive ancestors from the life of isolated tribes around the world? Let’s suppose so and see what we can learn: 1. in the literature we find tribes who practice agriculture in a stateless society 2. same 3. there are tribes that reached up to 20.000 people that were stateless and practically without hierarchy

Except all of this means nothing. We know that those factors, even if combined, don’t produce a State by material consequence.
History and causation should be distinct, but it’s extremely hard to do so because you’re basically left with nothing to work on. What we described then is not history nor science, it is the genesis myth of modern states. It is a myth brought forward by the intellectual of the State. It gives its birth a form of logical consequence, discriminating anyone who didn’t conform as primitive, not complex, inferior. In fact in this sense goes the use of “primitive societies” in Clastres: he claims that the term “primitive society” in the unconscious of the stateful societies means their opposite: a stateless society (see “la question du pouvoir dans les sociétés primitives”). We’ll adopt the same terminology in the remaining of the post.

Why are anarchists so obsessed with the genesis myth of the State? Two non-overlapping reasons:
- they want to revert to a pre-civilized world (primitivism)
- they want to understand what caused such inequalities to be imposed and accepted

But what if the good old stateless societies were not any better than our modern capitalist cages? Welcome Zerzan vs Clastres.

A prehistory of violence

According to Zerzan the root cause of our deplorable state is what he calls “symbolic culture”. I hope I’m not betraying his argument by simplifying this notion with “abstraction”: language, art, technology, religion are some of the examples among many. The power of abstraction becomes a power over nature, the realization of a distinction between subject and object: farming, division of labour, sexism etc.
According to Zerzan (who quotes a plethora of academics) primitive societies were happy ones. People would eat whenever they felt like it, there was no discrimination, the air was clean, the water clear, people would dance and play games together and feel connected to their environment. One key remark that Zerzan makes is that primitive societies were (are? his examples range from mbuti to !Kung to other tribes that were studied fairly recently and certainly had a symbolic culture) pacific. There was no violence because there was no discrimination, no will to impose power on something else.
Clastres makes pretty much the same observation taking from Sahlins: primitive society was one of abuncance (“L’economie primitive”). The view of a prehistoric heaven is captivating and is generally shared amongst other anarchists, namely Kropotkin and Ward, who see nature as an environment that favors cooperation rather than competition.

If anyone has ever thrown a book at you, you should realize that this contradicts Hobbes view of pre-state civilizations. The whole justification for a state is given in very practical terms: we need a state to end the chaos, bring order and peace among people.

Clastres view of primitive life is much closer to Hobbes, except for one point: he agrees that primitive societies were violent, he goes as far as to argue that violence and society cannot be thought separately, but far from being a condition from which humanity wants to leave, violence and war is what makes these societies egalitarian. In contrast to Hobbes, violence does not equate chaos. Violence is a resource with which people maintain their order, in particular against the prevarication of certain figures in the clan: chiefs and warriors.
The continouos madness of a senseless war avoids the possibility of someone gaining power over a tribe. In the southern American societies that he studied chiefs are generally ignored (are they simply a symbolic entity?) while warriors gain prestige at the cost of their lives. The more a warrior fights, the more prestige he gets, but he needs to up his previous performance to maintain his status. This perverse logic makes it so that warriors fight for their own death, something they seem eerlie aware of.
Chiefs should not be considered figures of authority, but rather, Clastres says, representatives for a tribe. They’re spokepersons, diplomats, the fruit of their labor is compensated in prestige, not power. At the same time, the gathering of resources shouldn’t exceed the needs of the community, lest it becomes reason for a division among rich and poor. This again is a responsibility given to the chief, who gains prestige thanks also to his generosity.

We see then a complete contrast: as much as Zerzan idolizes primitive life, he considers his ancestors fairly clumsy. As soon as they gained a bit of technology (agriculture) they couldn’t help themselves. Clastres on the contrary considers primitive tribes very aware of the danger of the state, a sense of danger that is passed on by myth and rituals, those exact features of the “symbolic culture” that Zerzan considers dangerous.

The fall from heaven

If prehistory was eden on Earth, why did humanity leave it? Clastres takes handful of ideas from La Boétie (“Liberté, malencontre, innomable”) who asked himself the same questions in the 16th century, namely:
- why do people decide (even crave!) to be controlled by others?
- how did this hierchy of man over man begin?
- (thus?) how did stateless societies become stateful?

Zerzan’s view has been already made clear. Clastres seems to share La Boétie’s which is, in a sense, a non-answer. They consider the birth of hierarchy and state as an “accident”. An unfortunate accident of history. Somewhere somehow that “prestige” given to warriors and chiefs grew over, couldn’t be controlled, and it became power. Yet, this gives rise to another question: how did this power maintain itself?

We know in fact that civilizations rise and die. The fall of the Roman Empire ensued chaos in Europe, but hierarchy could still be found. So is for south american civilizations in the Andes. No clear answer is given. The search continues.