AnarWiki/markdown/Worshiping_Power_(Book).md

**Worshiping Power: An Anarchist View of Early State Formation** is a
2017 [book](List_of_Libertarian_Socialist_Books "wikilink") by [Peter
Gelderloos](Peter_Gelderloos "wikilink") that discusses the way that
states form. The book mainly focuses on primary, secondary and tertiary
state formation.

## Summary

### I. Take Me to Your Leader: The Politics of Alien Invasion

In order for states to destroy [horizontal, egalitarian
societies](List_of_Libertarian_Socialist_Societies "wikilink") or
movements, they need to appoint some kind of hierarchical leadership.
Examples include colonial societies drawing artificial borders of
indigenous groups and appointing chiefs, taking local cultures and
writing out formal legal codes. Indigenous councils and governments were
set up in [Australia](Australia "wikilink"), [Canada](Canada "wikilink")
and the [USA](United_States_of_America "wikilink") in order to serve as
mediators between the government (allowing for a weakening of indigenous
social movements by forcing them to become lawyers and the easy
exploitation of indigenous land for mining, farming or forestry). States
used a combination of subsidies and repression to destroy the trade
union movement, turning it away from effective, horizontal forms of
organisation and into hierarchical, bureaucratic bodies incapable of
fully realising [workers'
self-management](Workers'_Self-Management "wikilink"). The media
frequently appoint 'leaders' and 'spokepersons' for rebellions and
protests in urban areas, weakening them.

The reasoning is simple. Hierarchical societies are easier to control,
and hierarchies cannot defend themselves from more powerful hierarchies.
Officials from a state cannot easily communicate with members of a
society in which decisions are made in [open
assemblies](Democratic_Assembly "wikilink"), or societies with
decentralised rather than centralised decision-making. When a state
communicates with another society, it is interested in transmitting
orders or legislating agreements, not in contributing its perspective to
the multitude. Furthermore, the population of a hierarchical society is
already organized, in some form or another, in order to be ruled,
whereas an egalitarian society is in fact organized, to varying extents,
specifically so as not to be ruled.

Thus the state needs various 'handles' or hierarchies it can exploit to
develop into more sophisticated forms of domination and power in
stateless societies. In purely horizontal societies without these
hierarchical structures, states tend to resort to all out strategies of
extermination and genocide. If they cannot be militarily defeated, the
state will resort to enforcing tribute (where the indigenous must
extract and give away resources to avoid invasion, effectively an
extortion racket) and slower forms of genocide (ie kidnapping children
and introducing narcotics into the area). Occasionally, the horizontal
society will realise the threat of the state and appoint diplomats to
try and negotiate, keeping the state back for as long as possible and
win favourable trade deals. This strategy usually backfires horribly, as
the diplomats make deal with the states to become a new ruling class in
exchange for survival, leading to the formation of the *[reluctant
client state](Reluctant_Client_State "wikilink")*.

The Roman Empire contented itself with tribute from the Germanic tribes
it could not conquer. French colonization in North America largely
failed to induce the decidedly anti-authoritarian Algonquian tribes to
develop state structures. Instead they sought tribute in the form of the
fur trade, and opted for slower, less dramatic forms of genocide—like
kidnapping native youth and forcing them into abusive Jesuit schools
where they would have to adopt the language and culture of the
colonizer. The modern Botswana state uses forced resettlement against
the horizontal San hunter-gatherers. Examples of colonizing states using
total extermination against resolutely anti-authoritarian peoples
abound, such as the Dutch extermination of the natives of the Banda
islands, the [British genocide in
Tasmania](Black_War_\(Tasmania\) "wikilink"), or the repeated massacres
of California natives by US settlers. The agents of colonization used
diplomacy and commerce, with a symbolic battle or massacre thrown in to
demonstrate their superiority. They make alliances, give gifts, play
local enemies off one another, win trading partners, favor compliant
leaders or representatives, kill or marginalize defiant ones, and
gradually try to bring their new allies into a client relationship,
seeking their dependence.

Of course, many stateless people (or people living in states in a
disadvantaged position, like slaves or the discriminated against) fight
rebellious wars or create autonomous communities to fight against the
state. However, these rebellious efforts can create states in
themselves, as people seek to partially imitate their oppressors by
adopting a hierarchical military, thus creating their own states in the
effort to resist a state (forming the [*rebel
state*](Rebel_State "wikilink")) Though it seems paradoxical, in the end
it is a common occurrence for a colonized people to imitate the
colonizer even as they rebel against them.

### II. Ze Germans: A State-Making Technology

### III. Save Me from Yourself: The Statist Spread of Salvation Religions

### IV. Sleeper States and Imperial Imaginaries: Authority’s Afterlife and Reincarnation

### V. The Modern State: A Revolutionary Hybrid

### 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
mountainous highlands that lie between the Peucini and the Fenni.
Nevertheless, they are on the whole to be classed as Germans; for they
have settled homes, carry shields, and are fond of travelling—and
travelling fast—on foot, differing in all these respects from the
Sarmatians, who live in wagons or on horseback. The Fenni \[around
present-day Lithuania\] are astonishingly savage and disgustingly poor.
They have no proper weapons, no horses, no homes. They eat wild herbs,
dress in skins, and sleep on the ground. Their only hope of getting
better fare lies in their arrows, which, for lack of iron, they tip with
bone. The women support themselves by hunting, exactly like the men;
they accompany them everywhere and insist on taking their share in
bringing down the game. The only way they have of protecting their
infants against wild beasts or bad weather is to hide them under a
makeshift covering of interlaced branches. Such is the shelter to which
the young folk come back and in which the old must lie. Yet they count
their lot happier than that of others who groan over field-labour, sweat
over house-building, or hazard their own and other men’s fortunes in the
hope of profit and the fear of loss. Unafraid of anything that man or
god can do to them, they have reached a state that few human beings can
attain: for these men are so well content that they do not even need to
pray for anything. What comes after them is the stuff of fables—Hellusii
and Oxiones with the face and features of men, the bodies and limbs of
animals. On such unverifiable stories I shall express no opinion. \[82\]

As the Roman historian’s gaze moves farther and farther from the
boundaries of the empire, passing through diminishing rings of state
influence, patriarchy, hierarchy, capitalist values, and scientific
certainty progressively disappear.

Environmental determinist explanations for state formation tend to focus
on original states. Because original states had the cards stacked
against them more than subsequent states, with state formation being so
actively resisted, we can accept that the first states arose within a
narrow range of ecological niches—those that presented the fewest
disadvantages—without assuming that the geography determined the state.

The inadequacy of the determinist lens becomes even more evident when
one examines secondary state formation. A map alone—coded to indicate
rainfall, soil type, elevation, and other data—could not allow us to
predict with high accuracy which parts of northern Africa, Europe, and
western Asia would be stateless, and to what degree, in the first
millennium of the current era. Geographic conditions in the Baltic
countries, the plains to the northeast of the Carpathians, or the
Maghreb were no more hostile to state formation than they were in the
Iberian Peninsula, England, or the original Russian territories. From
the Cherusci to the Fenni, peoples across Europe responded to the
pressures and influences exerted by the Roman Empire and subsequent
states, and positioned themselves accordingly.

This is not to say that a state’s influence diminishes smoothly with
distance and that anarchy therefore is a reactive function of remoteness
from existing states. Fiercely anarchic societies have existed and
thrived directly next to or even in the midst of the claimed borders of
powerful states. Speaking of Zomia, the highland area that extends
across Southeast Asia, James C. Scott writes:

After a demographic collapse following a famine, epidemic, or war
\[broadly speaking, state effects\]—if one were lucky enough to have
survived—swiddening \[the practice of shifting and diversified
agriculture generally associated with stateless peoples in the region\]
might become the norm, right there on the padi plain. State-resistant
space was therefore not a place on the map but a position vis-à-vis
power; it could be created by successful acts of defiance, by shifts in
farming techniques, or by unanticipated acts of god. The same spot could
oscillate between being heavily ruled or being relatively independent,
depending on the reach of the padi state and the resistance of its
would-be subjects. \[83\]

Additionally, “the choice between padi planting \[necessary for state
formation but not inevitably associated with it\] and swiddening is more
likely to be a political choice than a mere comparative calculation of
calories per unit of labor.” \[84\] Elsewhere, for example discussing
Chin attempts to resist and avoid British domination, Scott drives home
the point that the political choice of resistance, and the very
construction of a society’s fabric, often trumped economic
considerations.

A stateless society in Zomia could practice padi \[rice\] planting as
easily as swiddening, but the closer an anarchic society is to a state,
the more it requires a wide range of defensive advantages—prominent
among them, geography and subsistence techniques—in order to survive.
Thus, as state power grows in history, the more it appears that
inaccessible geography or supposedly primitive modes of production
determine anarchic social organization, though in reality they are only
enabling features often sought out by stateless societies as a
reflection of their decision to resist state power.

States, then, usually arose in geographical settings where the massive,
irrigated cultivation of the local cereal (rice, wheat, maize, etc.) was
feasible, though they were often parasites to innovation rather than the
original architects of irrigation, city-building, and agriculture. Once
they had latched onto a subject population they certainly encouraged
these activities and modulated them to encourage centralization.
Presumably, societies that evolved to become anti-state rather than
merely stateless, learned to reject such activities and develop others
that would give them symbolic and technical advantages in their fight
against state authority.

Many states collapsed due to problems of their own creation, such as
famine, epidemics, and warfare. \[85\] But they usually came back, and
over time, demonstrated their dominance within a narrow ecological
niche. Peoples determined to be stateless therefore developed, with
time, an identification with opposite subsistence practices, such as
foraging, hunting, swiddening, and pastoralism, and with opposite
ecological niches, such as mountains, deserts, forests, and swamps.

To counteract this migration, both physical and philosophical, away from
the realms of its domination, the early state had to develop
organizational and ideological tools to retain its subjects. As Scott
amply demonstrates, the states of Southeast Asia have historically been
obsessed with captivating their own populations. He quotes dozens of
adages and stratagems from all the states of the region, all similar to
the following, taken from a “Chinese manual on governance” from over a
thousand years ago: “If the multitudes scatter and cannot be retained,
the city-state will become a mound of ruins.” \[86\]

The Catholic Church, after the collapse of the Roman Empire, tried to
accomplish the same objectives as the mandala states of Southeast Asia.
Many early Catholic saints were civilizers and cultivators whose
miracles are related to acts of settlement, deforestation, clearing,
draining, and planting, taming the wilderness that had once again come
to cover Europe in the freedom of the Dark Ages. \[87\] In the Iberian
Peninsula, many pioneering villages corresponded to the sagrera model,
in which a newly constructed church would automatically gain ownership
over the lands within a certain distance from its walls. The peasants
worked the church lands, and also carried out subsistence activities in
the unclaimed forests and fields beyond the sagrera. The model was,
fundamentally, a religious protection racket. By living within the
sagrera (and working its fields), the peasants protected themselves from
acts of raiding or usurpation by nobles (commoners were not, contrary to
current misconceptions, powerless before nobles, but smaller groups of
peasants might have a harder time getting their commune officially
recognized by royal authority, which based much of its early power on
its function of arbiter between the nobility and the commoners).
Especially in more mountainous and rural regions throughout the early
Middle Ages, a principal difference distinguishing Christian from pagan
peasants was whether they submitted to the protection racket and agreed
to live in the Church’s shadow, or whether they tried to maintain
autonomous communities. Their religious practices—consistently syncretic
and often crossing the line into blasphemy, heresy, and polytheism—were
far from sufficient to qualify them as believers.

On the organizational plane, warfare was one of the first and most
common measures deployed to achieve and maintain the labor-power states
needed for their existence. This involved “forcibly resettling war
captives by the tens of thousands and by buying and/or kidnapping
slaves.” But as captives ran off, states had to develop complementary
methods. Subsistence activities and living outside of sanctioned
villages were prohibited, and state planners developed legal and
economic mechanisms, with the aim of forcing their subjects to choose
between grain cultivation and starvation. Tattooing or even branding of
subjects became common in certain places. The destruction of wild places
was another obvious tactic, if we accept the pathological mentality of
states and their agents. “Cut the forests, transform the forests into
fields, for then only will you become a true king,” as a ruler in
ancient Mali was instructed. \[88\] Forests were cleared, herds were
exterminated, marshes were drained. In more recent times, states have
been able to add the wholesale destruction of mountains to their
repertoire (first with megadam projects and then with mountaintop
removal mining).

Contrary to the mythology of social peace, which would have us believe
that state evasion is a thing of the past, this war on the world, this
wholesale destruction of places that favor ungovernability, is a
preoccupation that has stayed with states up until the present day.
Scott notes that the marshes on the lower Euphrates and the Pontian
marshes near Rome, each of them locations that have long harbored
rebels, outlaws, and state evaders right in the midst of two of the
cradles of civilization, were drained in the twentieth century by Saddam
Hussein and Benito Mussolini, respectively; he also mentions the Great
Dismal Swamp, one of the most important foci of indigenous, African, and
fugitive European resistance to colonization on North America’s eastern
seaboard. \[89\] And to this we can add the destruction of another
anarchic zone, the Appalachian Mountains, particularly the attempt to
carry out mountaintop removal mining on Blair Mountain, the site of a
short war between an interracial group of coal miners and the US
government, in 1922.

Social conflict can also turn once civilized territory into a liberated
space of resistance, self-organization, and illegibility. At the end of
the American Civil War, state power in the South had collapsed, and
through Reconstruction, the northern bureaucracy and northern
capitalists worked with the southern planting aristocracy to put the
former slaves back to work, either as wage laborers or as enslaved chain
gang prisoners. The overwhelming preference of the newly liberated
Africans, however, was to engage in illegible, non-monetary subsistence
activities like gardening, hunting, and fishing, to feed themselves as
communities rather than laboring for the production of cash crops like
rice and cotton. The State changed or broke its own laws to dispossess
Africans, Native Americans, and poor whites of the newly expropriated
plantations, drained the marshes and cut down the pine barrens that
often served as refuge for liberated communities, and instituted a reign
of terror through the indistinguishable forces of the police and white
vigilantes like the Ku Klux Klan to enforce racial separation and to
teach the citizenry that freedom was only granted to those who worked,
and “work” meant working for a rich person and never for one’s own
self-sufficiency; whether the labor contract was negotiated with whips
and chains or with salaries and evictions proved to be a mere detail. In
places like the Ogeechee Neck, where former slaves evicted the planter
aristocracy and their overseers and communalized the land, the military
had to come in to crush the rebellion. \[90\]

Urban zones of evasion have opened up in the cities of many modern
states, with subcultures, ethnic minorities, or large and heterogeneous
groups taking advantage of capitalist decadence to transform entire
neighborhoods into areas where census-taking, tax- and rent-collecting,
policing, the centralized control of popular culture, and the
enforcement of labor discipline all become difficult or impossible.
Police campaigns of criminalization and gentrification—which is
instigated by state planners more often than is commonly recognized—are
the main, and usually complementary, methods for demolishing resistant,
autonomous, illegible neighborhoods and constructing pacified, striated,
legible residential and commercial zones in their place. San Francisco’s
Mission District, Harlem and the Lower Eastside in New York, Kreuzberg
in Berlin, Raval and Gràcia in Barcelona, and the Cabanyal in València,
are all good examples of state evasion and the reimposition of state
control.

A long-standing task of municipal police and bureaucracies has been the
prohibition of street vending, the direct sale of their wares or produce
by small-scale artisans, who liberate themselves of the costly,
dependency-creating burdens of taxation, regulation, and rent. The
primary purpose of such state mechanisms is neither quality control nor
consumer protection, but the protection of shop owners and large
producers, and the prohibition of self-sufficiency. Even poorer urban
denizens might liberate themselves from the money economy and thus the
slavery of wage labor through squatting and dumpster-diving, both of
which are increasingly prohibited through legal and architectural means.
The latter might include the demolition or semi-legal renting of vacant
units, as commonly occurs in Spain and the Netherlands, respectively;
and as far as dumpstering is concerned through the use of trash
compactors or underground waste storage. Dumpstering, today, is the
malnourished final heir of a once proud tradition of rural commoning
that included gleaning in the fields after harvest or gathering
brushwood in the forests enclosed by lords and landowners, a practice
that came to be harshly punished by the UK’s Black Act and other laws in
the eighteenth century. \[91\]

From the beginning, architecture has been a principal means of exerting
control, organizing the population so that it is more comprehensible to
state surveillance and more susceptible to state administration, and
structuring certain forms of blackmail and coercion into the fabric of
social life. I give an anarchist history tour where I currently live in
Barcelona, and over several years of compiling radical histories and
chronicling the development of social control, I have come across an
important pattern. \[92\] A striking feature of all state interventions
in urban architecture is the remarkable convergence between the
strategic interest of exerting military control over the population, the
sociocultural interest of breaking up autonomous lower-class
neighborhoods, and the commercial interest of spurring legible economic
growth, sometimes to the point that they become indistinguishable. I
would argue that this dynamic reflects the essence of the social war and
can be found even in the earliest state interventions, although the
element of this trinity that is often posited as the foundation or
fundamental cause, the profit motive, can in fact be considered
extraneous in the short term. It is icing on the cake, a way for state
planners to communicate shared interests with the economic elite, and in
the long run, necessary for the state to fuel its processes of power
accumulation and social control, but it is by no means the sine qua non
of civilization. On the contrary, countless states have bankrupted
themselves in pursuit of the social war, and not every state that has
gone bankrupt has disappeared. Nor have all states held back from
destroying the productive processes they feed off of, when it was a
question of asserting social control.

This authoritarian convergence can also include non-state actors
applying progressive values they believe will make the world a more
equitable place, such as progressive environmental activists who help
modern states to wipe out state-resistant practices like swiddening
agriculture, which they hypocritically and myopically blame for larger
environmental problems. \[93\]

A common example of architectural control is the near universal location
(under non-modern states) of granaries within the city walls, where they
will be under the control of the civilization’s more privileged castes.
Considering the city walls themselves, which frequently exhibit a
structure of two or more tiers, we can intuit a few things about
non-modern states’ treatment of the middle classes, the artisans and
merchants. They were privileged, sheltered, culturally separated from
the peasants, but were also kept close, under the control of the rulers,
and thus generally or partially prohibited from an independent or
illegible economic activity.

Walls have also existed on a much greater scale. Contrary to popular
belief, or rather, the belief inculcated by statist education, the Great
Wall of China was constructed at least as much to keep the empire’s
citizens in as to keep the barbarians out.

Hadrian’s Wall, built by the Romans in the British Isles, served the
same dual purpose. Yet we are systematically taught that the only
purpose of the wall was to keep out the barbarians, who always remain on
the wrong side of history. The student is trained to view them from this
side of the wall. The needs of state are privileged, whereas the
stateless are presented as dangerous, opaque, and ultimately evil
outsiders.

Such walls are also important as symbols, and complementary to the
State’s organizational efforts to capture and retain subjects is a
whole array of ideological efforts that to this day shape what it means
to be a state subject. Religion, history, citizenship, nationality, and
identity as we know it all train us to be incapable of imagining our
lives outside of state authority. All of us grow up believing that the
State is an inevitable and universal evolution for humankind that
improved the quality of our lives; only later are we given access to the
information that conflicts with this narrative, once it already
constitutes our fundamental worldview and sense of self. We grow up
lacking information about contemporary or historical stateless peoples.
The vast majority never surpass this ignorance. States and their leaders
are fed to us as the protagonists of history, and when the stateless
cannot be symbolically suppressed as primitive, savage, obsolescent,
ignorant, evil, or terrorist, they are relegated to the shadowy backdrop
of a stage the State clearly commands.

Anticapitalists will often insist that the purpose of public education
is to prepare workers. This is balderdash, a perfect example of dogma
obviating reality. The vast majority of the lesson plan, once a pupil is
literate and knows the most basic maths, is irrelevant to the tasks of
the future worker, unless we count the abilities to follow orders,
accept confinement, and complete meaningless tasks; however, those
skills are required of all citizens, employed or unemployed, prole or
petty-bourgeoisie. A typical worker has absolutely no need to know about
ancient Egypt, William Shakespeare, or basic chemistry. No, the
fundamental purpose of education is to civilize children, and a large
part of this means filling their heads with the lies that are necessary
to make them always view history and society from the perspective that
privileges state power.

In recent literature, Hadrian’s Wall has come back to us as the Wall in
George R.R. Martin’s Songs of Ice and Fire. An intelligent writer,
Martin has incisively deconstructed the romantic aspects of state
mythology. In his worldview, statecraft is a bloody, authoritarian, and
cynical affair. Many of his most sympathetic characters are rebels who
fight authority or tragic characters who are foolishly dedicated to the
sham principles the State hypocritically espouses. Stateless people are
often depicted in a positive light; the most prominent example call
themselves the “Free Folk” and they refer to their statist neighbors as
“kneelers.” It is curious to see, at the vanguard of the popular
imaginary, which aspects of state mythology can be dismantled, and which
cannot. The stateless peoples in Songs of Ice and Fire are still kept to
the margins of history, and do not have any voice capable of offering an
anarchic solution to society. They remain a relic.

As for the Wall, as brutally honest as is the portrayal of statecraft in
these novels, mass abandonment of the State is never brought up as an
option. “Going savage” is not considered as a possibility. \[94\] The
Wall does not exist to keep the kneelers in, but only to keep out the
“wildlings,” and an even greater evil: the Others. The Others are a
completely unnatural monstrosity. What remains beyond the consciousness
of these novels is that the origin of monsters within our collective
imaginary is in the very margins of the State. Whether the source is the
fables of ancient Greek travelers, the more scientific account of
Tacitus, or the racialized fantasy of writers like J.R.R. Tolkien and
C.S. Lewis, monsters may only thrive where civilization and state
authority are weak. In other words, the monsters also represent
stateless people (or more broadly, forms of life, since humanity as
distinct from animality also blurs beyond the borders of the State).
Evil, in our imaginary, owes its existence entirely to the ideological
machinations of the State. (Making a similar point regarding the Early
Middle Ages, Le Goff notes that peasant morality was characterized by an
ambiguity between good and evil, in total contrast with the moralistic
dualism of the clergy. \[95\] ) In other words, Martin, though his
vision is admirable, has done nothing more than give us a multicultural
fantasy with good savages and evil savages, but in the end the narrative
is the same one that has played out—no, that we have been forced to play
out, and to swallow, and to play out again, until we believe it, until
we cannot question it and are no longer aware of its existence—for
thousands of years. In this context, it is tragically hilarious how
liberals speak of freedom of expression, as though it were a meaningful
concept. At a fundamental level, all expression in our civilization is
saying the same thing.

What would change if everyone grew up knowing that states built walls to
keep their subjects in, that a great motor of history was the state need
to coerce people into being its subjects, that all of us, in one way or
another, are the descendants of slaves, and that the mechanisms of our
enslavement have never disappeared, only been elaborated?

### VII. Chiefdoms and Megacommunities: On the Stability of Non-State Hierarchies

### VIII. They Ain’t Got No Class: Surpluses and the State

### IX. All in the Family: Kinship and Statehood

### X. Building the Walls Higher: From Raiding to Warfare

### XI. Staff and Sun: A New Symbolic Order

### XII. A Forager’s Mecca: Dreams of Power

### XIII. From Clastres to Cairo to Kobane: Learning from States