HeavenlyPossumSome 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.
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