In Zeno’s Republic , according to the fragments preserved for us by Diogenes Laertius, there are no lawcourts, police, armies, temples, schools, money or even marriage. People live as a single ‘herd’ without family and property, with no distinctions of race or rank, and without the need for money or courts of law. Above all, there is no longer any need for compulsion. People fulfil their natures living in a stateless society of complete equality and freedom which spreads across the whole globe.
Ever since man emerged as homo sapiens , he has been living in stateless communities which fall roughly into three groups: acephalous societies, in which there is scarcely any political specialization and no formal leadership (though some individuals have prestige); chiefdoms, in which the chief has no control of concentrated force and whose hereditary prestige is largely dependent on generosity; and big-man systems, in which the charismatic big man collects his dues for the benefit of society.
Reklam
Age-class societies in the anthropological record are very strongly associated with stateless societies without leaders. Whatever was invented at the end of the eighth century BC in Sparta, the unique dual kingship was not, neither archaic nor Dark Age Sparta can really be supposed to have been leaderless, and, although important for military training and organisation, year-groups never played more than an indirect and peripheral role in Spartan political life.
In describing the state as a proletarian ‘dictatorship’, Marx utilized the first theory of the state, seeing the state as an instrument through which the economically dominant class (by then, the proletariat) could repress and subdue other classes. All states, from this perspective, are class dictatorships. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was seen as a means of safeguarding the gains of the revolution by preventing counter-revolution mounted by the dispossessed bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, Marx did not see the state as a necessary or enduring social formation. He predicted that, as class antagonisms faded, the state would ‘wither away’, meaning that a fully communist society would also be stateless. Since the state emerged out of the class system, once the class system had been abolished, the state, quite simply, loses its reason for existence.
Communities such as the Anuak maintained a relatively high degree of social order through a variety of often ingenious methods that were rarely based on large inequalities of statues or, indeed, wealth. In stateless societies, those leaders who did enjoy enhanced statues did so because they redistributed rather than accumulated wealth.
Sayfa 23 - 24
Abbas Vali
Wales Üniversitesi, Svvansea, Siyaset ve Uluslararası İlişkiler Bölümünde modern Ortadoğu siyaseti profesörüdür. Pre-Capitalist İran: A Theoretical History (1993) ve Modemity and the Stateless: The Kurdish Ques- tion in Iran (2003) adlı kitapların yazarıdır. Halen Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Sosyoloji bölümünde misafir öğretim görevlisi olarak ders vermektedir
