Isn’t “the state” just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties? There’s a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members. At that stage, culture becomes a force unto itself, propagating further than the members that comprise it. That point, more than money, seems to be where exploitative behavior becomes more likely to take hold.
Like, feudal aristocracies were plenty exploitative, plenty domineering. But they didn’t necessarily need money for it; a lot of them operated on barter economies. They just needed a knife-point and a cultural belief to justify the domination. Money is just an innovation on a much older process.
Isn’t “the state” just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties?
This is “community”
“State” refers to a group of people that feel entitled to rule over others and use violence to do so. To help ensure their power they create laws that make their violence legal and give it names like “law enforcement” and make your violence, particularly violence to protect yourself against them, illegal. This typically goes along with enclosure leaving people nowhere to escape the state.
There’s a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members.
This is true but does not on it’s own lead to the formation of state. Without dominator types successfully taking advantage of the situation, it could just as well lead to loosely connected communities. Also, the size of early non-state communities was limited to ecosystem provided resources (i.e. they were inherently sustainable), our populations are not because we found fossil energy.
Domination and “the state” are not equivalent, but it takes the former for the latter to come about. Domination without the state has always existed on some level, I think that pre-state societies had cultural mechanisms to prevent dominators from taking over.
Isn’t “the state” just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties? There’s a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members. At that stage, culture becomes a force unto itself, propagating further than the members that comprise it. That point, more than money, seems to be where exploitative behavior becomes more likely to take hold.
Like, feudal aristocracies were plenty exploitative, plenty domineering. But they didn’t necessarily need money for it; a lot of them operated on barter economies. They just needed a knife-point and a cultural belief to justify the domination. Money is just an innovation on a much older process.
This is “community”
“State” refers to a group of people that feel entitled to rule over others and use violence to do so. To help ensure their power they create laws that make their violence legal and give it names like “law enforcement” and make your violence, particularly violence to protect yourself against them, illegal. This typically goes along with enclosure leaving people nowhere to escape the state.
This is true but does not on it’s own lead to the formation of state. Without dominator types successfully taking advantage of the situation, it could just as well lead to loosely connected communities. Also, the size of early non-state communities was limited to ecosystem provided resources (i.e. they were inherently sustainable), our populations are not because we found fossil energy.
Domination and “the state” are not equivalent, but it takes the former for the latter to come about. Domination without the state has always existed on some level, I think that pre-state societies had cultural mechanisms to prevent dominators from taking over.