💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › pierre-clastres-society-against-the-state.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:14:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Society Against the State
Author: Pierre Clastres
Date: 1989
Language: en
Topics: anthropology, economy, primitivist, the state, excerpt
Source: Retrieved on 5th November 2018 from http://www.primitivism.com/society-state.htm
Notes: An excerpt from Clastres’ Society Against the State.

Pierre Clastres

Society Against the State

Primitive societies are societies without a State. This factual

judgment, accurate in itself, actually hides an opinion, a value

judgment that immediately throws doubt on the possibility of

constituting political anthropology as a strict science. What the

statement says, in fact, is that primitive societies are missing

something — the State — that is essential to them, as it is to any other

society: our own, for instance. Consequently, those societies are

incomplete; they are not quite true societies — they are not civilized —

their existence continues to suffer the painful experience of a lack —

the lack of a State — which, try as they may, they will never make up.

Whether clearly stated or not, that is what comes through in the

explorers’ chronicles and the work of researchers alike: society is

inconceivable without the State; the State is the destiny of every

society. One detects an ethnocentric bias in this approach; more often

than not it is unconscious, and so the more firmly anchored. Its

immediate, spontaneous reference, while perhaps not the best known, is

in any case the most familiar. In effect, each one of us carries within

himself, internalized like the believer’s faith, the certitude that

society exists for the State. How, then, can one conceive of the very

existence of primitive societies if not as the rejects of universal

history, anachronistic relics of a remote stage that everywhere else has

been transcended? Here one recognizes ethnocentrism’s other face, the

complementary conviction that history is a one-way progression, that

every society is condemned to enter into that history and pass through

the stages which lead from savagery to civilization. “All civilized

peoples were once savages,” wrote Ravnal. But the assertion of an

obvious evolution cannot justify a doctrine which, arbitrarily tying the

state of civilization to the civilization of the State, designates the

latter as the necessary end result assigned to all societies. One may

ask what has kept the last of the primitive peoples as they are.

In reality, the same old evolutionism remains intact beneath the modern

formulations. More subtle when couched in the language of anthropology

instead of philosophy, it is on a level with other categories which

claim to be scientific. It has already been remarked that archaic

societies are almost always classed negatively, under the heading of

lack: societies without a State, societies without writing, societies

without history. The classing of these societies on the economic plane

appears to be of the same order: societies with a subsistence economy.

If one means by this that primitive societies are unacquainted with a

market economy to which surplus products flow, strictly speaking one

says nothing. One is content to observe an additional lack and continues

to use our own world as the reference point: those societies without a

State, without writing, without history are also without a market. But

common sense may object — what good is a market when no surplus exists?

Now, the notion of a subsistence economy conceals within it the implicit

assumption that if primitive societies do not produce a surplus, this is

because they are incapable of doing so, entirely absorbed as they are in

producing the minimum necessity for survival, for subsistence. The

time-tested and ever serviceable image of the destitution of the

Savages. And, to explain that inability of primitive societies to tear

themselves away from the stagnation of living hand to mouth, from

perpetual alienation in the search for food, it is said they are

technically under-equipped, technologically inferior.

What is the reality? If one understands by technics the set of

procedures men acquire not to ensure the absolute mastery of nature

(that obtains only for our world and its insane Cartesian project, whose

ecological consequences are just beginning to be measured), but to

ensure a mastery of the natural environment suited and relative to their

needs, then there is no longer any reason whatever to impute a technical

inferiority to primitive societies: they demonstrate an ability to

satisfy their needs which is at least equal to that of which industrial

and technological society is so proud. What this means is that every

human group manages, perforce, to exercise the necessary minimum of

domination over the environment it inhabits. Up to the present we know

of no society that has occupied a natural space impossible to master,

except for reasons of force or violence: either it disappears, or it

changes territories. The astonishing thing about the Eskimo, or the

Australians, is precisely the diversity, imagination, and fine quality

of their technical activity, the power of invention and efficiency

evident in the tools used by those peoples. Furthermore, one only has to

spend a little time in an ethnographic museum: the quality of

workmanship displayed in manufacturing the implements of everyday life

makes nearly every humble tool into a work of art. Hence there is no

hierarchy in the technical domain: there is no superior or inferior

technology. The only measure of how well a society is equipped in

technology is its ability to meet its needs in a given environment. And

from this point of view, it does not appear in the least that primitive

societies prove incapable of providing themselves with the means to

achieve that end. Of course, the power of technical innovation shown by

primitive societies spreads over a period of time. Nothing is

immediately given; there is always the patient work of observation and

research, the long succession of trials and errors, successes and

failures. Prehistorians inform us of the number of millenia required by

the men of the Paleolithic to replace the crude bifaces of the beginning

with the admirable blades of the Solutrian. From another viewpoint, one

notes that the discovery of agriculture and the domestication of plants

occurred at about the same time in America and the Old World. One is

forced to acknowledge that the Amerindians are in no way inferior —

quite the contrary — in the art of selecting and differentiating between

manifold varieties of useful plants.

Let us dwell a moment on the disastrous interest that induced the

Indians to want metal implements. This bears directly on the question of

the economy in primitive societies, but not in the way one might think.

It is contended that these societies are doomed to a subsistence economy

because of their technological inferiority. As we have just seen, that

argument has no basis either in logic or in fact. Not in logic, because

there is no abstract standard in terms of which technological

“intensities” can be measured: the technical apparatus of one society is

not directly comparable to that of another society, and there is no

justification for contrasting the rifle with the bow. Nor in fact,

seeing that archaeology, ethnography, botany, etc. give us clear proof

of the efficiency and economy of performance of the primitive

technologies. Hence if primitive societies are based on a subsistence

economy, it is not for want of technological know-how. This is in fact

the true question: Is the economy of these societies really a

subsistence economy. If one gives a meaning to words, if by subsistence

economy one is not content to understand an economy without a market and

without a surplus — which would be a simple truism, the assertion of a

difference — then one is actually affirming that this type of economy

permits the society it sustains to merely subsist; one is affirming that

this society continually calls upon the totality of its productive

forces to supply its members with the minimum necessary for subsistence.

There is a stubborn prejudice in that notion, one which oddly enough

goes hand in hand with the contradictory and no less common idea that

the Savage is lazy. While, in our culture’s vulgar language, there is

the saying “to work like a nigger,” there is a similar expression in

South America, where one says “lazy like an Indian.” Now, one cannot

have it both ways: either man in primitive societies (American and

others) lives in a subsistence economy and spends most of his time in

the search for food; or else he does not live in a subsistence economy

and can allow himself prolonged hours of leisure, smoking in his

hammock. That is what made an unambiguously unfavorable impression on

the first European observers of the Indians of Brazil . Great was their

disapproval in seeing that those strapping men glowing with health

preferred to deck themselves out like women with paint and feathers

instead of perspiring away in their gardens. Obviously, these people

were deliberately ignorant of the fact that one must earn his daily

bread by the sweat of his brow. It wouldn’t do, and it didn’t last: the

Indians were soon put to work, and they died of it. As a matter of fact,

two axioms seem to have guided the advance of Western civilization from

the outset: the first maintains that true societies unfold in the

protective shadow oft he State; the second states a categorical

imperative: man must work.

The Indians devoted relatively little time to what is called work. And

even so, they did not die of hunger. The chronicles of the period are

unanimous in describing the fine appearance of the adults, the good

health of the many children, the abundance and variety of things to eat.

Consequently, the subsistence economy in effect among the Indian tribes

did not by any means imply an anxious, full-time search for food. It

follows that a subsistence economy is compatible with a substantial

limitation of the time given to productive activities. Take the case of

the South American tribes who practiced agriculture, the Tupi-Guarani,

for example, whose idleness was such a source of irritation to the

French and the Portuguese. The economic life of those Indians was

primarily based on agriculture, secondarily on hunting, fishing, and

gathering. The same garden plot was used for from four to six

consecutive years, after which it was abandoned, owing either to the

depletion of the soil, or, more likely, to an invasion of the cultivated

space by a parasitic vegetation that was difficult to eliminate. The

biggest part of the work, performed by the men, consisted of clearing

the necessary area by the slash and burn technique, using stone axes.

This job, accomplished at the end of the rainy season, would keep the

men busy for a month or two. Nearly all the rest of the agricultural

process — planting, weeding, harvesting — was the responsibility of the

women, in keeping with the sexual division of labor. This happy

conclusion follows: the men (i.e., one-half the population ) worked

about two months every four years! As for the rest of the time, they

reserved it for occupations experienced not as pain but as pleasure:

hunting and fishing; entertainments and drinking sessions; and finally

for satisfying their passionate liking for warfare.

Now, these qualitative and impressionistic pieces of information find a

striking confirmation in recent research — some of it still in progress

— of a rigorously conclusive nature, since it involves measuring the

time spent working in societies with a subsistence economy. The figures

obtained, whether they concern nomad hunters of the Kalahari Desert, or

Amerindian sedentary agriculturists, reveal a mean apportionment of less

than four hours daily for ordinary work time. Lizot, who has been living

for several years among the Yanomami Indians of the Venezuelan Amazon

region, has chronometrically established that the average length of time

spent working each day by adults, including all activities, barely

exceeds three hours. Although I did not carry out similar measurements

among the Guayaki, who are nomad hunters of the Paraguayan forest, I can

affirm that those Indians, women and men, spent at least half the day in

almost total idleness since hunting and collecting took place (but not

every day) between six and eleven o’clock in the morning, or

thereabouts. It is probable that similar studies conducted among the

remaining primitive peoples would produce analogous results, taking

ecological differences into account.

Thus we find ourselves at a far remove from the wretchedness that

surrounds the idea of subsistence economy. Not only is man in primitive

societies not bound to the animal existence that would derive from a

continual search for the means of survival, but this result is even

bought at the price of a remarkably short period of activity. This means

that primitive societies have at their disposal, if they so desire, all

the time necessary to increase the production of material goods. Common

sense asks then: why would the men living in those societies want to

work and produce more, given that three or four hours of peaceful

activity suffice to meet the needs of the group? What good would it do

them? What purpose would be served by the surplus thus accumulated? What

would it be used for? Men work more than their needs require only when

forced to. And it is just that kind of force which is absent from the

primitive world; the absence of that external force even defines the

nature of primitive society. The term, subsistence economy, is

acceptable for describing the economic organization of those societies,

provided it is taken to mean not the necessity that derives from a lack,

an incapacity inherent in that type of society and its technology; but

the contrary: the refusal of a useless excess, the determination to make

productive activity agree with the satisfaction of needs. And nothing

more. Moreover, a closer look at things will show there is actually the

production of a surplus in primitive societies: the quantity of

cultivated plants produced (manioc, maize, tobacco, and so on) always

exceeds what is necessary for the group’s consumption, it being

understood that this production over and above is included in the usual

time spent working. That surplus, obtained without surplus labor, is

consumed, consummated, for political purposes properly so called, on

festive occasions, when invitations are extended, during visits by

outsiders, and so forth.

The advantage of a metal ax over a stone ax is too obvious to require

much discussion: one can do perhaps ten times as much work with the

first in the same amount of time as with the second; or else, complete

the same amount of work in one-tenth the time. And when the Indians

discovered the productive superiority of the white men’s axes, they

wanted them not in order to produce more in the same amount of time, but

to produce as much in a period of time ten times shorter. Exactly the

opposite occurred for, with the metal axes, the violence, the force, the

power which the civilized newcomers brought to bear on the Savages

created havoc in the primitive Indian world.

Primitive societies are, as Lizot writes with regard to the Yanomami,

societies characterized by the rejection of work: “The Yanomami’s

contempt for work and their disinterest in technological progress per se

are beyond question.” The first leisure societies, the first affluent

societies, according to M. Sahlin’s apt and playful expression.

If the project of establishing an economic anthropology of primitive

societies as an independent discipline is to have any meaning, the

latter cannot derive merely from a scrutiny of the economic life of

those societies: one would remain within the confines of an ethnology of

description, the description of a non-autonomous dimension of primitive

social life. Rather, it is when that dimension of the “total social

fact” is constituted as an autonomous sphere that the notion of an

economic anthropology appears justified: when the refusal of work

disappears, when the taste for accumulation replaces the sense of

leisure; in a word, when the external force mentioned above makes its

appearance in the social body. That force without which the Savages

would never surrender their leisure, that force which destroys society

insofar as it is primitive society, is the power to compel; it is the

power of coercion; it is political power. But economic anthropology is

invalidated in any case; in a sense, it loses its object at the very

moment it thinks it has grasped it: the economy becomes a political

economy.

For man in primitive societies, the activity of production is measured

precisely, delimited by the needs to be satisfied, it being understood

what is essentially involved is energy needs: production is restricted

to replenishing the stock of energy expended. In other words, it is life

as nature that — excepting the production of goods socially consumed on

festive occasions — establishes and determines the quantity of time

devoted to reproduction. This means that once its needs are fully

satisfied nothing could induce primitive society to produce more, that

is, to alienate its time by working for no good reason when that time is

available for idleness, play, warfare, or festivities. What are the

conditions under which this relationship between primitive man and the

activity of production can change? Under what conditions can that

activity be assigned a goal other than the satisfaction of energy needs?

This amounts to raising the question of the origin of work as alienated

labor.

In primitive society — an essentially egalitarian society — men control

their activity, control the circulation of the products of that

activity: they act only on their own behalf, even though the law of

exchange mediates the direct relation of man to his product. Everything

is thrown into confusion, therefore, when the activity of production is

diverted from its initial goal, when, instead of producing only for

himself, primitive man also produces for others, without exchange and

without reciprocity. That is the point at which it becomes possible to

speak of labor: when the egalitarian rule of exchange ceases to

constitute the “civil code” of the society, when the activity of

production is aimed at satisfying the needs of others, when the order of

exchange gives way to the terror of debt. It is there, in fact, that the

difference between the Amazonian Savage and the Indian of the Inca

empire is to be placed. All things considered, the first produces in

order to live, whereas the second works in addition so that others can

live, those who do not work, the masters who tell him: you must pay what

you owe us, you must perpetually repay your debt to us.

When, in primitive society, the economic dynamic lends itself to

definition as a distinct and autonomous domain, when the activity of

production becomes alienated, accountable labor, 1evied by men who will

enjoy the fruits of that labor, what has come to pass is that society

has been divided into rulers and ruled, masters and subjects — it has

ceased to exorcise the thing that will be its ruin: power and the

respect for power. Society’s major division, the division that is the

basis for all the others, including no doubt the division of labor, is

the new vertical ordering of things between a base and a summit; it is

the great political cleavage between those who hold the force, be it

military or religious, and those subject to that force. The political

relation of power precedes and founds the economic relation of

exploitation. Alienation is political before it is economic; power

precedes labor; the economic derives from the political; the emergence

of the State determines the advent of classes.