Worshiping Power. Peter Gelderloos
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undergoing an anti-authoritarian social evolution. Even the most peaceful, trade- or conversion-oriented states, seeking to maintain relations with other populations, have sometimes ended up disrupting their new neighbors to the point of destroying them. All states view stateless populations as potential property, and deny their fundamental right to exist. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” that phrase of bureaucratic insanity from the Vietnam War, expresses the statist mentality in the most lucid, logical way possible.
Negotiation with a state tends to result in domination, whether the form that takes is inclusion in exploitative trade networks, imperial annexation, or total annihilation. True independence from states can only come through warfare.
In Suriname, Jamaica, and Haiti, Africans running away from enslavement by the Dutch, British, Spanish, or French, and banding together to form communities of resistance in the mountains and forests formed a number of stateless societies. Many of these groups were firmly anti-authoritarian. After failing to subdue Suriname’s Boni maroons in a guerrilla war that lasted 150 years, the Dutch tried civilizing them by signing treaties promising peace if the maroon communities would help hunt down and recapture slaves who escaped thenceforth. The maneuver failed, and today seventy thousand descendants of the “bush maroons” still live in relative autonomy in Suriname.
The English had a little more success on Jamaica, but they also ended up fighting guerrilla wars for a hundred years against the maroon communities that began to form there in the 1650s. The most noted resistance figure of the Windward Maroons, who were organized in a decentralized, anti-authoritarian fashion, was Granny Nanny. The Leeward Maroons, on the west side of the island, were organized hierarchically. Their leaders were men, the most famous of whom was named Kodjo. It was the Windward Maroons who resisted signing peace treaties with the English the longest. After signing the treaties, the maroons on Jamaica were obliged to help the British return newly escaped slaves and suppress slave rebellions, in return for peace and partial autonomy. The British thus forced the maroons to accept a kind of border, a differentiation between the maroon citizens, who were entitled to the right of freedom, and the colonial subjects, governed by British slave laws. The border was a first step towards creating distinct nationalities, ending the subversive hospitality with which the maroons had previously welcomed all runaways into their community. In the end, what was most important for the British was not to reassert control over specific people or a specific territory, but to close an open space in which their divisions of race, nationality, and class lost all meaning.
The most dramatic example of maroon resistance comes from Haiti. In the 1750s, Mackandal led a group of enslaved African plantation workers in a rebellion against the French colony. The movement was hierarchically organized, and when its leader was executed, it quickly died out. In 1791, the rebellion that would eventually defeat the French Crown, the English, the Spanish, and then the French republican troops under Napoleon broke out and spread in a horizontal, decentralized fashion, not developing hierarchical forms for several years. The most influential people in sparking the uprising were two Voudun priests, a man and a woman. It is noteworthy that among all the maroon resistance movements, the decentralized ones were the only ones in which women also held leadership positions, and leadership was more often shared, whereas the centralized movements, which were also more likely to imitate European cultural and political forms, were exclusively led by men.
Eventually, Toussaint L’Ouverture claimed the title of general and organized a European-style army, centralizing the resistance movement. On the cusp of victory, he submitted to Napoleon’s demands, helping the French to restore a certain kind of order to the island. This betrayal sparked a new decentralized rebellion, which forced the French out. A number of Toussaint’s officers, however, inserted themselves into leadership positions, establishing a European-style state with French assistance. One after another, first Dessalines and then Henry Christophe, ruled like tyrants and were eventually assassinated by their own people.26
Haiti provides an example of the rebel state. This model arises from the militaristic pressures of a resistance war, from the possibilities a rebellion offers for charismatic figures to ascend and come into control of a proto-state structure (the rebel military), and from the cultural dominance of the occupying state (which implants statist forms of legitimacy, a statist cultural pedigree, and statist methods of military organization in the collective consciousness of the occupied people). Though it seems paradoxical, in the end it is a common occurrence for a colonized people to imitate the colonizer even as they rebel against him, such that a movement for freedom from a specifically statist oppression becomes a reproduction of state authority.27
14 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 211–12.
15 Ibid., 258.
16 Ibid.
17 For a further elaboration of this view as it pertains to differing strategies in a social movement (direct democracy vs. anarchy), see Anonymous, “Fire Extinguishers and Fire Starters: Anarchist Interventions in the #SpanishRevolution,” CrimethInc., June 2011, http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/barc.php. As it pertains to social theory, see Marianne Maeckelbergh, The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (London: Pluto Press, 2009).
18 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 212.
19 Henk Rijkeboer, “History of the Dutch East India Company—The Asian Part,” European Heritage, 2011, http://european-heritage.org/netherlands/alkmaar/history-dutch-east-india-company-asian-part.
20 R.A. Guisepi, ed., “Africa and the Africans in the Age of the Atlantic Slave Trade,” History World International, history-world.org (accessed January 7, 2016).
21 Ibid.
22 Eleonora L’vova, “The Formation and Development of States in the Congo Basin,” in The Early State, Its Alternatives and Analogues, 291.
23 L. Irwin, “Cherokee Healing: Myth, Dreams, and Medicine,” American Indian Quarterly 16, No. 2 (1992).
24 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 87–90, 110.
25 Ibid., 91–92.
26 Information on the maroon rebellions in Suriname, Jamaica, and Haiti can be found in Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Random House, 1963); and Wim S.M. Hoogbergen, The Boni Maroon Wars in Suriname (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990). Readers whose interest is in overthrowing states, not jut studying them, will also find the following source interesting: Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, “The Dragon and the Hydra,” 2010, https://russellmaroonshoats.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/the-dragon-and/.
27 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961).
II. Ze Germans: A State-Making Technology
In the year 983, the Slavic inhabitants of that forested plain south of the Baltic sea, where the river Spree winds past a series of placid lakes, the spot where a city known as Berlin now stands, rose up against their masters. The Slavs, known as Wends, were ruled by a Germanic elite