Worshiping Power. Peter Gelderloos
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domination that are prevalent in early states.
The three Congo basin states practiced servitude, whereby war captives, condemned criminals, or their relatives had to toil in fields, act as domestic workers, porters, personal servants, or bodyguards. The labor they provided was minor, far from constituting the primary form of economic exploitation, and the conditions and labor demands they faced were significantly lighter than those of the slaves under the Roman Empire or the later European nation-states. Clients (most typical in the Baluba state) enjoyed a much higher status than servants. Attaching themselves to a noble family, they played the role of bodyguards or assistants. Over time, the mutual obligations of clients and patrons took on a hereditary form. The societies that preceded these states were all non-patriarchal or only lightly patriarchal, whereas all three states pushed to institute more patriarchal relations.
These internal processes, perhaps more important in the formation of the Congo basin states than their practices of warfare and conquest, correspond to patterns that will be discussed in a subsequent chapter.
28 I don’t know of any geographical society or academic institution that advocates the redesignation of Europe as a subcontinent; nonetheless only the obstinate self-importance of the white supremacists who founded such institutions can explain the continental classification. Not tectonically, not geographically, not historically, not even culturally can Europe qualify as a continent. On all grounds India has a far better claim to continent-hood.
29 Inventing new terms can be an obnoxious habit; nonetheless in the literature on state formation I found no term for a body that acts intentionally and aggressively as a vessel and vector for state-making technologies and as a direct agent for state formation, but does not in itself constitute a state, lacking the requisite host population.
30 Boehm (“Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy”) details the frequency with which leaders of stateless societies were deposed or even killed by others with less status. Among the two most frequent motives for such topplings are the perceived greediness and the authoritarianism of the leader.
31 Tacitus singles out the Goths as the most “autocratic” of the Germanic tribes, “but not to such a degree that freedom is destroyed.” Tacitus, in The Agricola and the Germania, translated by H. Mattingly (98; repr., Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1948), 138.
32 Arthur, though he is presented to us as a king, is a good example of a non-state leader: it is not institutional legitimation but charisma and magic attaining specifically to his person that he needs in order to rally his warriors, who sit together in a circle.
33 Michal Tymowski, “State and Tribe in the History of Medieval Europe and Black Africa—A Comparative Approach,” in Social Evolution and History, 177.
34 Ibid., 174.
35 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, xi.
36 Cited in ibid., 259, 264–65.
37 Tacitus, The Agricola and the Germania, 98.
38 Ibid., 108.
39 Ibid., 118.
40 Ibid., 122–23.
41 Ibid., 114.
42 David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Cambridge: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004).
43 Dmitri V. Dozhdev, “Rome,” in Civilizational Models of Politogenesis, edited by Dmitri M. Bondarenko and Andrey V. Korotavey (Moscow: Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2000), 261.
44 Ibid., 265.
45 Arthur Evans, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture: A Radical View of Western Civilization and Some of the People It Has Tried to Destroy (Boston: Fag Rag Books, 1978), 45.
46 Ibid., 46.
47 L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States,” 288–89.
48 Ibid., 290.
49 Ibid.
50 Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work, and Culture in the Middle Ages, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
51 L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States,” 295.
52 Ibid., 295, 294–95.
53 Ibid., 294.
III. Save Me from Yourself: The Statist Spread of Salvation Religions
“Adoption of the [state] model was tantamount to adoption of Christianity, which legitimized the political order of the state.”54
The parastatal Catholic Church had attached itself to the Roman Empire, using that structure’s last centuries to spread the religion considerably, converting the elites and then the peasants of barbarian societies. When the empire fell, the Church held on to the dream. Even where it was too weak to constitute an imperial state, it spread a common cultural language that favored state formation and preached obedience to authority. Over centuries, it served as a centralized network to mobilize resources for state formation, until the power of those states increased to a point where they either monopolized the resources of the Church or rebelled against it, creating their own autonomous churches with a doctrine modified to legitimize the transformed basis of their power.
What is often missed in the progressive telling of history is that the Romans came closer to the creation of capitalism than subsequent societies, up until the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of colonization beyond Europe. In the meantime, the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines, and the Arab states kept capitalist structures alive in the Mediterranean world system. A major cause of the peasant rebellions that began to occur in Western Europe in the Late Middle Ages was the restoration of Roman law by local elites, which allowed land to be bought and sold as a commodity. As a direct result and parallel, the condition of peasants—who were much better off in the Middle Ages or under the earlier German tribes than their Roman homologue, the slave—began to deteriorate gravely, as the worker was created, on the one hand, and on the other the institution of slavery was brought back—not from nonexistence, but from decline—and intensified and expanded immeasurably.
The epidemics, poverty, starvation, servitude, intolerance,