In “Forms of brutality: Towards a historical sociology of violence,” Siniša Malešević observes that interpersonal violence varies from place to place and time to time, but in general has remained fairly low throughout human history. What *has* changed is the state’s ability to mobilize entire populations to conduct industrial warfare and murder; there is nothing like the Holocaust in the pre-modern historical record. 

Not every act of violence is committed by a state; not every non-state society is free of violence or hierarchy. But every state is violent, as violence is one of the key defining aspects of the state. States exist to use violence to extract resources to facilitate more violence to empower the state to collect more resources. That is, at their heart, what they are.

It’s in this way that we can distinguish the state from, say, a non-state tribal community. Even if that tribe has a leader—many don’t or didn’t—that leader (a chief or a king or whatever) might only be able to command through persuasion and exercise violence personally, if at all. The state, in contrast, institutionalizes violence; not only the king but also the courts and the police and the army and the bureaucrats and the jailers will all endorse and facilitate the state’s violence.

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 I don’t mean for this to be an exhaustive exploration of the nature of the state or its flaws. Lots of people have written lots about those. What I wanted to do here was introduce what I meant and did not mean, specifically, when I talked about the state.

I’m planning a few more threads about some of the complex, urban, but nonstate societies I mentioned above, and I wanted to be clear up front about how to distinguish the state from its alternatives. The state is not a synonym for a community, or a polity, or governance; it’s a specific institution of rule, violence, and extraction. We pay taxes for a reason: because the state wants our stuff or, more likely, the state wants us to labor for it or it’s (capitalist) allies, and taxes are a great way of mobilizing that labor. We don’t pay taxes to “pay our fair share” towards the common good. We don’t need the state for that or, well, for anything, really.

As always, if you appreciate my toots, you can support me at the link below, and stay tuned as I write more threads and explore ways of expanding my work into longer-form pieces.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/heavenlypossum

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