Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:49 JST HeavenlyPossum

   Thousands of years ago, people were experimenting with all sorts of complex, dense social forms. Over 11,000 years ago, at Göbekli Tepe in what is now Turkey, people were erecting some of the world’s first monumental stone architecture. 11,000 years ago at Jericho, in Palestine, people were settling in one of the world’s first cities. At Çatalhöyük, also in Turkey, people 9,000 years ago built a complicated, honeycomb-like city. 5 to 6,000 years ago, people in what is now Ukraine built sprawling settlements. People were experimenting with urban life, with agriculture, with writing and all sorts of new phenomena.

   Then, a little more than 5,000 years ago, in what is now southern Iraq, something entirely new began to emerge in some of the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia: the state.

   1/#thread

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruk_period

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:46 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     In his essay “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” written long before this archeological evidence was available, American sociologist conjectured essentially the same thing.

     In the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, we saw bands of mounted warriors attach themselves to settler agrarian communities and offer their services for “protection” in a manner identical to what we’re familiar with from the Mafia today.

     These early modern states were rudimentary but recognizable as states: they had elite authorities who set rules, monopolized violence, and extracted resources. But they faced a problem: neighboring states wanted to expand into their territory, and they wanted to expand into their neighbors’ territory, to grow richer. So they fought wars. Lots of wars.

     But war is enormously expensive, from feed for horses to blacksmiths for armor to merchants to provide food on campaign. So these early states were forced to seek ever more elaborate mechanisms for extracting resources to provision armies in the field to fight wars to expand territory.

     In this way, these rudimentary states incrementally expanded their purview, seeking new sources of revenue. In return, they frequently had to make concessions to sub-state actors (usually the ones with their own fiscal resources), bringing merchants and bankers and landlords into the structure of the state itself.

     They expanded taxation. This required more administrators, to survey and catalogue assets. They expanded conscription. This required a census and last names to catalogue people. They borrowed lots and lots of money. This created public finance and public debt.

     Step by step, the rudimentary mafioso state became the modern administrative state, not because something fundamental had changed about the state but to get better at taking and hurting.

     7/

     https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:46 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Quite a few people I encounter express some variation of the idea that “the state, however objectionable, provides valuable services.” It’s worth asking, though, which of those services, if any, *require* the state, and which are provided by the state in its effort to improve the efficiency of extracting resources and labor from its subjects.

     Not every exploitive or violent hierarchy is a state, and we should not end our struggle with the state. An abusive, patriarchal family; an extractive, controlling religious cult. But the state is the prevailing and predominant hierarchy of power, violence, and exploitation in our lives, and it empowers and is indistinguishable from all the others.

     Some could exist without the state, like the patriarchal family. Some would struggle, like white supremacy. Some couldn’t exist without the state at all, and indeed are indistinguishable from the modern state.

     8/

     novatorine 🏴🏳️‍⚧️ repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:46 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     The state commands, and the state extracts, and the state kills. The state does not provide.

     To the extent that we experience the state providing us with anything, we’re receiving from people who were compelled by the state’s power to provide for us. Maybe those people would provide for us of their own volition. Maybe we could freely induce them to provide, in the absence of the state.

     Lots of people have the illusion that states can be “democratic,” in the sense of comprising an entire community as an electorate (liberals) or a class (Marxists). This is simply not the case. A state can never be synonymous with the community over which it rules.

     “The state…is not an abstraction floating above society and its members; it is a social institution, and, as such, a group of human beings, a section of society, organised in a particular way…wherever there is a state, there is always a group of human beings who stand in a different relationship to it from most members of society: not as the dominated, or the excluded, but as the dominators and the excluders.”

     - Adam Buick and John Crump, “State Capitalism”

     9/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:47 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     There are lots of theories about how the state emerged, but one that I find particularly satisfying is described in James Scott’s book “Against the Grain.”

     We know that people in places like Mesopotamia were already living in urban settlements and experimenting with agriculture and writing thousands of years before the first state. The marshlands of southern Iraq were incredibly ecologically diverse and rich, and sustained dense populations of foragers who also toyed with agriculture, casually tossing handfuls of seeds in the rich mud left by the annual river floods and returning months later to leisurely gather the resulting grains.

     These dense, food-rich, settled communities were neighbors to peoples who would occasionally raid and pillage these communities. They must have been inviting targets, having done the foragers’ work of hunting and gathering for them.

     So what if, we can speculate, one of these raiding peoples decided that, rather than periodically attack, they would set themselves up on top of the settled communities? What if those first states, with their parasitic elites and walls and barracks and armies and wars and scribes who catalogued every bull and stand of wheat, were conquerors who integrated themselves as rulers of pre-existing urban communities?

     This would certainly reflect a well-established pattern in human history, of warrior-barbarians conquering and then ruling over a subject population of farming food-producers.

     6/

     https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Qing_dynasty

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:48 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     But states don’t just create rules and enforce them violently. They’re not simply dispassionate judges, sitting atop society to preserve order for the public’s benefit. Every single state that exists or has existed uses those rules and that violence to do roughly four big things:

     - collect resources from the people under its jurisdiction;

     - define a territory that it controls and police its boundaries;

     - administer its territory and subject population; and

     - mobilize the labor of people under its jurisdiction for the state’s purposes.

     Lots of different kinds of social organizations engage in one or more of these activities. A temple might collect tithes; a forager band might patrol its territory. But put them all together and you have something very state-like; marry that to a monopoly on violence and you have the state.

     4/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:48 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Some people seem to think that anarchist critiques of the state are critiques of any human social or political organization, which is too absurd to deserve much of a response. But there are lots of people who recognize the state for what it is—an authority that uses violence to compel obedience to its rules—and believe that this violent inequality is the price we have to pay for social complexity.

     This is not true, and we know this from a growing body of archeological and historical evidence about past societies that were stateless but complex, in addition to what we know about existing, modern societies that manage complexity outside of the state.

     In those megasites of the Cucuteni-Trypillia culture of Ukraine, in the cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, in the towns and cities of Mesopotamia before the state, we keep finding all the signs of social complexity and urban life that we’d recognize and value today: economic specialization, writing, complex public infrastructure, long-distance trade, divers peoples living together without violence, uniform weights and measures…

     What we don’t find are the signs of states that are so tragically apparent in Uruk and Ur and Egypt and the Longshan culture in China.

     Archeologists keep looking, but the evidence just isn’t there. There are no reliefs depicting war prisoners yoked together and marched into slavery. The monumental infrastructure is open to all rather than walled off for palace elites. Writing is widespread rather than reserved for palace scribes.

     No one was ordering these people how to live and hurting them if they failed to obey, it appears.

     5/

     https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-06-23/why-are-archaeologists-unable-to-find-evidence-for-a-ruling-class-of-the-indus-civilization/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:49 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     In places like Uruk and Ur and Egypt, the unmistakable signs of states first appeared. City walls. Opulent inhabited by rulers. Temples inhabited not just by priests, but also vast armies of slaves and wage laborers toiling in workshops. Slavery, war, and conquest. Literate bureaucrats who collected taxes and recorded payments and debts. Conscription, imprisonment, and massive public works.

     Virtually all of the features of the modern state, with which we’re so intimately familiar, can be traced back to that initial development in the Bronze Age Near East.

     One of the most common objections to anarchism that I encounter seems based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what the state actually is.

     The state is not, as many people seem to think, a synonym for generic human political organization. It’s not another way of referring to social or political complexity. It’s something fairly specific, but so pervasive now that it can easily seem like a natural condition, just another part of the background noise of our lives.

     2/

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 04:56:49 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     Max Weber, a German sociologist who lived from 1864 to 1920, famously connected the state to a monopoly on violence. Here’s what he wrote in his work “Economy and Society”:

     “A compulsory political organization with continuous operations will be called a 'state' insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.”

     This is not a perfect or complete definition of the state, and indeed nothing could be—I think “state-ness” is something that probably exists on a spectrum. But there are some really important insights here.

     First is that the state is a political organization (or network of organizations) that enforces an order: it’s a group of people, which endures over time and not just temporarily, that creates rules for other people.

     Second, that organization uses violence to enforce its rules. Fail to obey the state’s rules, and the state will send someone to hurt you.

     Third, it doesn’t just use violence but it *monopolizes* violence. The state wants to be the only actor that gets to hurt people, and it sure doesn’t want to get hurt. The state is *sovereign,* the supreme authority in a given area.

     And fourth, that monopoly on violence is legitimate—not in the sense of being right or just or good, but in the sense that the state’s use of violence will be endorsed by other actors subject to the state’s rule. If a cop shoots you, the cop probably will not go to prison, but you might (if you survive).

     3/

     https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber

   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 20:11:15 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     We can see this easily when we return to the issue of a monopoly over violence. I’ve had people try to argue that a Marxist state or a liberal democratic state is different from these more primitive, predatory states because these states represent or are managed by the body politic as a whole.

     But what happens if two members of those societies disagree with each other about the use of violence, and try to use violence against each other? The state can only endorse one side of conflict; its monopoly over violence cannot be mobilized by two opposing sides, simultaneously, to further their incompatible goals.

     The state can endorse one, or neither, but it cannot endorse both. It cannot mobilize its resources to both support and oppose Donald Trump’s coup attempt on January 6, 2021. For the state to exist as an authority over a society with a monopoly over the use of violence, someone must be empowered to decide when and how and against whom violence is mobilized and someone must submit to that violence.

     We cannot have our cake and eat it too. The state’s monopoly over violence cannot belong to all of us simultaneously.

     10/

     HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴 repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     HeavenlyPossum (heavenlypossum@kolektiva.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 20:11:15 JST HeavenlyPossum

     in reply to

     We can see this readily when we investigate the extent to which even ostensible “democracies” ignore the preferences of voters in favor of the preferences and goals of elites allied to the state.

     One study, published in 2014 by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, found exactly this:

     “Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy.”

     States do not enact the preferences of their voters, even when they bother with elections, because states are not “democratic” in any meaningful sense of bottom-up, consensual self-rule through cooperation. States enact the preferences of the elites who make up the state or, increasingly in the modern world, elites who stand apart from but have wholly captured the state as their agent.

     11/

     https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

   • Embed this notice
     HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴 (histopol@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Sep-2023 20:13:49 JST HistoPol (#HP) 🏴 🇺🇸 🏴

     in reply to

     @HeavenlyPossum

     Sounds interesting and is not counter-intuitive.

     Don't have the time to read the long paper, but glanced through it. Was looking for a country comparison.

     My hypothesis would be that the direct democry of Switzerland should fare significantly better in these respects.

     Would be very interesting to see, as we now have the tools to have a direct form of democracy in large countries.