o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

anarchy 93
Zerzan, Perlman is keen to contest the view that primitivism
describes a rude or meagre way of life. People in primitive,
pre-Leviathanic societies were inventive; they had tools and they
devised ways of satisfying their needs and wants. Many ‘kingless
people’ Perlman argues, ‘rode horses and some wielded iron
implements’. They engaged positively with their environment and
they lived well. Pressing his point, Perlman contrasts the life of the
Possessed – nomads who wandered all over the earth, from Eurasia
to America – with the modern Dispossessed. The former ‘were very
fond of animals; they knew the animals as cousins’. He continues:
‘[s]ome of the women learned from birds and winds to scatter seeds.
Some of the men learned from wolves and eagles to hunt’. But they
did not work. For the most part, the women performed dances and
‘abandoned themselves to visions, myths and ceremonies’. Yet life
was not a struggle since the wanderers ‘loved nature and nature
reciprocated their love’. Indeed, wherever people went ‘they found
affluence’. In contrast to the Dispossessed who live in ‘abundance’,
the Possessed did not ‘go to the theatre and see plays ... sprawl in
front of the TV and consume the entire worldwide spectacle’. Nor
did they possess very much – ‘houses and garages, cars and stereo
equipment’. But their life, unlike that of the Dispossessed, was one
of richness and not lived ‘in the pits and on the margins of
industrialization’. 10
These different analyses of primitive or stateless society support
two broad conclusions about the status of anarchy. The first is that
anarchy is a natural condition. As Barclay argues, it is the most common
and ‘oldest type of polity which has characterised ... human
history’. 11 Anarchy appears unnatural only because history has
favoured the organization of the state and because, even in a globalized
world where the powers of the state appear to be challenged, this
historical trend is unlikely to be reversed. Yet even though the state
has endured, the study of stateless societies suggests that it is both
impermanent and alien. The second point, which flows from this, is
that the destruction of anarchy came about through the emergence
of a state system. Studies of statelessness do not suggest that the state
developed with the same rapidity in all parts of the globe. Kropotkin
suggested that the state was a European invention that was exported
to the rest of the world through colonization. Barclay offers a similar
explanation. The state was developed as a prototype ‘in only a few
places’. In most instances, ‘it was copied from the original ... invariably
under duress’. But once the state was instituted the process of