"Oh no they're feeding people we don't like on land they don't pay our protection racket for, and they self-organized to do it without using coercive hierarchies! Quick, get 'em!"
"Oh no they're feeding people we don't like on land they don't pay our protection racket for, and they self-organized to do it without using coercive hierarchies! Quick, get 'em!"
Hierarchies tend to be much more malleable outside of state contexts. Think about the seasonal cultures that are sometimes heirarchal and sometimes egalitarian. Think about the "chiefs" who are cast out if they don't provide enough yams to their subjects.
Agreed! Thing is, most non state societies had these. Anthropologists call them "leveling mechanisms."
There were a couple of societies up until like the 90s where if someone was trying to bully you or order you around you could just pick up your 50-60ish pounds of tools and posessions, give that person the finger, and walk a day or two to go live with your cousins or neighbors or whatever. The environment had enough food, and population density was low enough, that no one could easily monopolize and control resources. Afaik that mostly changed as neighboring farmers and pastoralists moved in to the region, but it's something that existed in some places within many of our lifetimes.
You can see some echoes of it in places like the GDR; The whole meme about women having better sex bc they could just leave shitty relationships due to the GDR's housing, jobs, and childcare policies. Shitty men couldn't control women when the women could just pack up and go somewhere else with relatively little difficulty.
The violence of the state clearly makes these sorts of hierarchies rigid. Indeed, that's what a state is.
Right. And I really end up wondering: can a state maintain the heirarchy of proletariat over vanquished bourgeoisie without the office of state becoming its own fixed heirarchy?
Afaik one of the critical drivers of most hierarchies is the ability to control access to important resources. It's really easy to control access to a mine, factory, or farm. But it's very hard to control access to wild or semi-wild fruit trees, or goats, or the sea. For that exact reason a lot of states undertook operations like exterminating the Bison/Tatanka, draining swamps that people relied on for forage and hunting, banning numerous kinds of hunting and foraging tools, or just clear cutting forests. If people can just wander around eating what they find and sleeping where they please you can't make them pay taxes, so one of the first things a state has to do is enclose the commons, slaughter the wild game, post soldiers at the wells, and otherwise create scarcity.
We've got a lot of potential existing and emerging technologies that could make it much harder to centralize control of some kinds of resources and products, so there's definitely some room for movement there. If you can use a lathe to build a lathe then build some motors and stick a cheap computer on and eventually you've bootstrapped your way to 3d-printers and 3-axis mills you're less dependent on big, expensive, easy to control factories. That's not enough by itself, but that removes some ways that capitalists and states can control a population.
Like I'm not saying it's everything by any means, but one potential road to a stateless society is creating a world where people can just pick up and leave if someone tries to bully them. Chasing nomads and semi-nomads around has historically been very resource intensive and undesirable and those are often some of the last populations to be forcibly integrated in to states. It's why one of my "If I ruled the world" dreams is converting the whole planet in to a vast permaculture gardne where you can find stuff to eat anywhere in any season.
Oh shoot yeah, that was my "crank socialist megaproject" from that recent thread.
The way you're talking, you would really like As We Have Always Done by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. She hits a lot of the same points as you, builds on Fanon and draws on her own experiences practicing indigenous life ways in so-called Canada.
Something I haven't really resolved in myself. I have a tendency, but revolutionary energy is so far from where I live atm and it's more important to bring people on side and help people with their struggles to build community.