A-Infos (en) Chile, RL: The Society Against the State by Pierre Clastres (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The challenge is not to romanticize native forms, but to recognize the 
plurality of political forms and learn from their strategies of social 
articulation outside of state logics. ---- Capitalist modernity, which 
in our territory began with the arrival of European invaders at the end 
of the 15th century, gradually shaped several ideological constructs 
that remain in effect to this day. On the one hand, the liberal ideas 
that emerged in Europe established the concept of the "individual" as an 
autonomous subject within their social context who, through their own 
effort and achievements, can be the master of their own destiny and 
differentiate themselves infinitely from other individuals, even while 
sharing territory, class, ethnicity, or gender. On the other hand, the 
capitalist social order was also presented as the only possible world, 
rendering invisible the social injustices at its core and establishing 
the narrative that the current state institutions that control life are 
historically neutral and unalterable.

This same liberal and capitalist perspective permeated how other peoples 
of the planet are understood and treated. First Europe, and then the 
United States, rose to become global powers from which the rest of the 
world is viewed and evaluated. Consequently, other geographical areas, 
and especially the peoples of Africa and Latin America, are seen as 
backward, underdeveloped, or simply inferior. This established an 
ethnocentric view between the center and the peripheries, which 
justified, first through religion and then through science, the 
implementation of significant injustices and inequalities at a global level.

The conquest of the Americas by various European powers resulted in the 
extermination and/or subjugation of many native peoples. Spaniards and 
Portuguese debated whether the inhabitants of these territories were 
human beings or whether they truly possessed souls that warranted 
Christianization, all in order to justify their enslavement, along with 
the Afro-descendant populations forcibly brought to exploit natural 
resources. In each conquered territory, the violence and exploitation of 
the subjugated peoples were justified in different ways.

Thus, to this day, the dominant view of Indigenous peoples remains 
pejorative and ethnocentric; that is, while their heroic past may be 
acknowledged, their present-day cultural expressions are reduced to mere 
folklore, and those who identify as belonging to one of these peoples 
are pressured to relinquish their identity, renounce territorial claims, 
recognize private land ownership, and adopt the individual citizenship 
of nation-states. The underlying assumption remains that these are 
backward cultures that must be rushed along the single path of 
capitalist modernity.

Pierre Clastres
Therefore, " Society Against the State ," written by the anarchist 
anthropologist Pierre Clastres (1934-1977) and published in 1974, is 
considered a landmark in 20th-century anthropology, as it critiques 
Western ethnocentrism, which continues to justify the global 
inequalities of the capitalist system. Specifically, it questions the 
linear conception of progress, which tends to place indigenous societies 
in an "earlier" phase of social development.

Specifically, Clastres's research demonstrates that the state is not a 
universal destiny for all cultures, but rather a specific historical 
form. Within this framework, the political division between those who 
rule and those who obey is not inherent in every society, but rather the 
result of a particular historical process: the emergence of coercive power.

With the exception of the great Inca, Aztec, and Mayan empires, most of 
the continent's Indigenous peoples were characterized by social 
structures in which hierarchies lacked coercive power; that is, there 
was no permanent warrior force to impose the will of the elites. The 
Indigenous chief did wield political power, but this power did not 
depend on a monopoly of force, which could give rise to state 
structures. Instead, it was based on collective recognition, the use of 
language, conflict mediation, and acts of generosity toward other 
members of his group. Thus emerged the possibility of societies that, 
despite having social hierarchies and the injustices that came with 
them, did not construct state forms of domination. The homogenizing 
horizon of capitalist modernity is not an unavoidable reality but rather 
one imposed form among other possibilities.

Unfortunately, Clastres does not develop a systematic definition of 
"political power," but rather operates with an implicit notion that he 
then organizes by distinguishing between coercive and non-coercive 
power. This generates ambiguities, since the political power he observed 
in native peoples, despite lacking coercive capacity, did reproduce 
hereditary hierarchies based on prestige, tradition, or charisma. In 
other words, by privileging coercion as the decisive criterion, Clastres 
tends to underestimate symbolic dimensions of power that can produce 
obedience and hierarchy without the need for force.

Secondly, his assertion that "society controls the leader" appears 
weakly substantiated, as he fails to identify any concrete mechanisms 
that have been used to remove leaders and reinstate new structures. 
Despite these limitations, Clastres' contribution is crucial in 
demystifying the association between social development and the creation 
of the State as a form of political domination. It is not simply a 
matter of imagining a stateless society, but of recognizing that social 
forms have existed and continue to exist that, while reproducing 
hierarchies, do not consolidate coercive mechanisms, thus decisively 
broadening the range of possibilities for social organization.

By questioning the universality of the state as a political form, 
Clastres's research can be read in dialogue with decolonial approaches 
that denounce the imposition of European epistemological frameworks on 
diverse historical realities. Thus, Indigenous societies cease to be the 
object of a narrative of backwardness and become subjects of their own 
political rationality, with their own contradictions and specificities.

From an anarchist perspective, we acknowledge the contributions of 
Pierre Clastres' anthropology, but we also recognize its weaknesses, 
such as the underestimation of symbolic power and the idealization of 
certain forms of equality within the groups studied. Subsequent 
contributions are relevant here, showing how domination can operate 
without the use of force itself, as well as research that reveals more 
conflictive internal dynamics within Indigenous societies. From this 
perspective, the challenge is not to romanticize native forms of social 
organization, but to recognize the plurality of possible political forms 
and learn from their strategies of social articulation outside of 
state-run systems.

https://revistalibertaria.cl/la-sociedad-contra-el-estado-de-pierre-clastres/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en