In order to critique these three approaches, it would help to clarify the concept of the State. I think it is useful to refer both to the ethical, idealist, and oppositional definition proposed by anarchists, for example the framework Bakunin lays out in “Rousseau’s Theory of the State” and Statism and Anarchy: “If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable—and this is why we are the enemies of the State”; as well as the structural, evolutionary definition of anthropologists, which gives quantitative and analytical criteria to differentiate the State from other forms of social organization. The latter, in its simplest form, identifies a bureaucratic, territorial, coercive organization with multiple levels of administration, in which power is institutional rather than personal, and power-holders monopolize (at least ideally) the legitimate use of force and the codification of morality.4 Both of these definitions will be further developed throughout the text. I think it is useful to combine them in an unresolved tension in order to achieve both strategic clarity and analytical clarity, the latter to allow us to distinguish historical changes and the former in order to root our new understanding within a struggle for freedom. There is no learning without taking sides, and there is no theory that does not also project a vision of the future.
According to dialectical materialism, the State is a product of class divisions in society: government is an organizing tool of the owning class, and different forms of governance are determined by a society’s economic mode of production. The problem with this theory is that state formation cannot be the product of class divisions in society because it precedes such divisions, as argued by Pierre Clastres. A mechanism of political power is required to permit class divisions to grow, and a mechanism of spiritual power to allow concepts like surplus and duty to appear. On the whole, what early Marxists analyzed as material conditions and superstructure tend to evolve simultaneously, but if one had to simplify, numerous timelines of state evolution show that what materialists assume to be a cause is more often an effect. Turning material and other forms of determinism on their heads, Christopher Boehm, in an extensive survey of stateless societies, demonstrated that the key factor allowing a society to be stateless was not its mode of production or geographic conditions, but an ethical and political determination to prevent the emergence of hierarchy: what he referred to as “reverse dominance hierarchy,” in which special functions were compartmentalized rather than centralized and potential leaders were closely watched, and were abandoned, exiled, or assassinated if they exceeded their powers or acted in a greedy or authoritarian manner. In contrast to a mechanistic trend in academia that would dismiss freedom as a subjective illusion or meaningless concept, we anarchists assert that will, both individual and collective (at which level it is often read as culture), is an indispensable force for shaping our society, our mode of production, and our relationship to the earth.5
Capitalism can easily be read as the motor of the modern state, and at a certain moment in European history, the needs of an emerging class of investors, merchants, and workshop owners exceeded the political capacities of the absolute monarchies, with their cumbersome, unresponsive bureaucracies oriented towards the needs of a landowning aristocracy. The bourgeois class forced the creation of rationalized, democratic governments capable of proactive social reengineering, a sort of top-down terrorism that would leave the parasitism of earlier states behind and transform the whole of social life into an accessory of economic production and state power. Never mind that this process can be more accurately read as the imposition of social control than as the accumulation of capital, though the latter has also been an essential force. A longer-term analysis shows that such power struggles have transformed models of state organization many times in the past, and that with great frequency states have taken the initiative to transform society and implement new productive models. Sometimes capitalists have modernized government in order to increase their power, and sometimes governments have imposed proactive measures to rescue capitalists from their own shortsightedness. However, capitalists and their predecessors—slaveowners, moneylenders, merchant-investors—owe their very existence to the State. In early states, concentration of political and spiritual power precedes economic stratification in society. Many societies at the cusp of state formation lacked significant forms of economic exploitation. As a general rule, reciprocity is the basis of society and culture.6 It was the political power that early states accumulated that allowed them to rework the basic foundations of society in order to make exploitation feasible.
Hundreds or even thousands of years of social evolution, along authoritarian or “homoarchic” lines, were required for the emergence of haves and have-nots, individual property, quantification of value, toilers and parasites. And parallel to these proto-state societies, we have examples of alternative forms of social evolution with an equal technological complexity and similar productive techniques, that chose decentralized forms of organization, and non- or even anti-authoritarian cultural values. As regards societies with little or no economic stratification, there are hundreds of examples of human societies practicing a variety of modes of production and different forms of political organization, from hunter-gatherers in California to agriculturalists in southwest Asia, with no clear pattern, no deterministic link between one and the other. Even among primates of the same species, practicing the exact same “mode of production,” one can find significant differences in the level of hierarchy between different groups.7
Looking at the native populations of the Americas, Pierre Clastres cites examples of societies that switched from sedentary agriculture to nomadic hunting without any significant change to their kinship and other social structures; hunter-gatherer societies that developed sedentary agriculture again without significant changes to what Marxists would term “superstructure”; and multiple cases of neighboring societies with completely different modes of production but almost identical forms of social and political organization.8
I would also be remiss if I did not mention early Marxism’s intrinsic racism as a reason for contesting its explanations of state formation. Such racism, implicit in a pro-imperialist framework that lauds Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon, and portrays the colonization of less developed (read: non-Western) countries as progress, becomes explicit when Marx and Engels speak of “barbarian nations,” “lazy Mexicans,” “energetic yankees,” “the interests of civilization,” and so forth. Either we abandon the project of forcing non-European societies to pass through a Eurocentric dialectic, or we must erect absurd figures like an “Asiatic” or “African mode of production” to shore up a theory that simply does not square with the historical record.9
Environmental determinism fares better under scrutiny than materialism, since there is a solid correlation between environmental factors and social evolution. However, we can easily fail to notice that environmental determinists are far better gamblers than theoreticians. Albeit with great acuity, they perform what is in the end a simple, if not simplistic, operation: the selection of geographical factors that advantage state formation, like river valleys, distance from the equator, fertile plains where major irrigation works are feasible, etc. The problem is, they set these factors to masquerade as an explanation when in fact they tell us absolutely nothing about causation. This is where gambling comes in. Geography clearly aids or impedes state formation. If you can correctly identify just one of a hundred factors that make state formation more feasible, given a broad enough sample (like, say, all of human history) you will statistically come out on top. That doesn’t mean that the one factor you have been able to identify is the only factor, nor that it is a trigger or cause. What it comes down to is that environmental determinists are unable to take any single river valley or fertile plain and predict that in a certain moment in history, there will or will not be a state there.
Hindsight also plays a big role. An alien observer, knowing only the geography of Earth and using the determinist method, would probably select China as the likeliest spot for a world-dominating state to emerge. We can explain why this wasn’t the case, as Jared Diamond does: China had too many factors working for it, allowing political unification to occur too early, so that the evolving state