In the Chapter on Systems Theory I discussed self-organisation and I will revisit this topic in respect of hunter-gatherer societies now.
Pierre Clastres the French philosopher/writer proposed that the history of peoples without history is the history of their struggle against the state.
In other words, the nation state is continually taking over peoples without history and oppressing them – then writing their history from the point of view of the oppressor. I mention in the Chapter on Power and Control in Society that all nation states (that I know of anyway) come into being by violence.
Sometimes hunter-gatherer people are described as stateless, implying that their societies are not real societies.
Virtually all societies eventually become nation states, but not some modern hunter-gatherer bands, some of whom have resisted the urge to evolve into a nation state for thousands of years, and some of whom are untouched by the nation state anyway.
In such societies, social and economic control are still within the hands of the majority, and did not become centralised for the benefit of a few strong, smart ones, as a political economy does.
This required a high degree of self-organisation, and a sophisticated outlook in respect of power and control. Centralisation is a lot easier, when you think of it – and it implies Government, with all the trappings of political power.
Getting back to Kropotkin, he argued (as did, in later years, people such as Clastres mentioned above) that while the nation state cannot exist without government, governance can take place in a society that is stateless. He maintained that the nation state did not protect the rights of individuals; rather it trampled all over them for economic, political and military reasons, and particularly when they felt that their power was under threat.
Anarchists of his time did not want to destroy society; they merely wanted to replace the state with something that might work a little better for ordinary people, with sharing and reciprocity to the fore rather than top-down domination.
This was of course in the late nineteenth century, when conscription was the norm for most of what were then called the Great Powers in Europe. The idea of self-organisation would have been very frightening to the people at the top – it is no wonder that anarchy was deemed to be a very bad idea!