This is the third and final part of our three-part (I, II, III) look1 at how some ‘tribal’ or more correctly, non-state agrarian peoples – particularly the Celtiberians, Gauls and also many Germanic-language speaking peoples on the Rhine and Danube- raised armies to fight the Romans (and anyone else who came knocking) in the third, second and first centuries BC.
Last time, we looked at the communal governing structures these non-state polities had and discussed both how they coordinated collective military action, but also why they were too weak to really function as states, with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in the society. Instead, as we noted, military power wasn’t institutional (that is, vested in institutions bigger than the individuals occupying them) but personal, held by individual Big Men who could raise their clients as armies (rather than, say, as voters) for either foreign wars or domestic conflict.
This week, at last, we’re going to raise our non-state army. First we’re going to look at what we can chart of the process used to raise these armies and then discuss the kind of armies that process resulted in. Finally, we’re going to take in the whole system: what are its strengths and what are its weaknesses?
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Finally Raising The Army
At last, with all of our pieces in place, both the foundational social structures and the communal governing institutions, we can raise our army. This is a process we never quite see very clearly in our sources, but I think there’s enough details we do gather that we can basically chart how a Gallic, Celtiberian or Germanic-language-speaking civitas mobilizes for war.
The move to war pretty clearly starts at the top, with either a civitas senate or the principes who are a subgroup of it. These are the fellows who are regularly engaged in foreign affairs and the point-of-contact for foreign ambassadors (e.g. Diod. Sic. 31.39; App. Hisp. 51, 94; Livy 32.30.7-11; Caes. BGall. 2.5, 8.22.2 and explicitly at Tac. Germ. 11.1). One of the things we see quite clearly in Caesar’s narrative in Gaul is that one way civitas government could break down is when one of the principes wants to urge the civitas to war, but is blocked by the others, as in the case of Dumnorix, Vercingetorix and purportedly Correus (Caes. BGall. 1.16-17; 7.4; 8.21), but while that evidently happens frequently enough that the communal institutions clearly lack full control over the use of military force, presumably in most cases the community goes to war collectively. So the principes, sensing threat or opportunity, come together and make that decision; I think, given what we see, we ought to assume that the iuvenes, themselves likely often the sons and relatives of the principes were usually a pro-war constituency not explicitly represented among the seniores or senatores, but whose rank and weapons gave them a capacity to ‘act out’ if the elders didn’t go to war as they wanted.2
The next step is to call the popular assembly, which can double as the muster. I’d guess there is an official system for notifying the various settlements (pagi, villages and oppida, fortified towns) that a muster has been called – when in doubt, assume organization, not disorder, because these are thinking humans3 – but the news is also going to come through the aristocrats. After all, that muster is also a meeting of the public assembly, so each aristocrat, for political reasons, is going to want their clients to show up and be visible: it both increases the aristocrat’s status, but also could potentially sway votes.
So the principes, having decided for war, now rush to mobilize their clients and supporters for the muster. They’re of course relying on those dense social networks we detailed in the first post: they draw on their clients, for whom military service is the trade they make for the help in tough years and access to gifts and goods from the Big Man. Some of those clients are themselves Big Men with their own clients and they have all sorts of incentives to turn them out too. And when the pressure reaches down to the individual communities (those pagi), you have the horizontal bonds kick in: if your brother-in-law and your cousin and both of your good friends are grabbing their weapons to head to the muster, you will too (out of shame if nothing else – shame is one of the few things people fear as much, if not more than, death) even if you don’t feel particularly attached to the Big Man sounding the call.
Now the civitas government almost certainly does not have the institutional structure to pay these fellows, much less arm them – though some Big Men may have ‘gifted’ weapons to their clients as part of their reciprocity which conveniently also creates warrior-voters. The most state-like civitas we see in this period (which again, is third-through-first century BC; much ‘state-ier’ Germanic-language-speaking polities in Late Antiquity) is probably the civitas of the Aedui with their supreme magistrate (the Vergobret) and some centralized taxes. But those taxes notably are portoria (customs duties) and vectegalia (revenues from state-owned things, probably rents from land), not tributum (direct head or land taxes), so the revenue from them is probably pretty slight (Caes. BGall. 1.18) and they’re farmed out to an aristocrat in any case. That’s probably not going to provide the kind of cash to pay wages to soldiers or stockpile equipment for them, but that’s fine, because this system doesn’t need that.
Instead, I think we have a lot of indicators in these societies that the possession of arms was the sine qua non of free and full membership in the community, so the fellows coming to the muster are bringing all of their own kit. Tacitus says this explicitly about the Germani (Tac. Germ. 13.1-3), while Caesar notes that one voted in Gallic popular assemblies by clashing weapons, which of course means you have them (Caes. BGall 5.56.1-2; 7.21.1, note also Tac. Hist. 5.17). The fact that Vercingetorix can outflank the principes of the Arverni by just mobilizing the countryside also suggests that even the “poor and desperate” he is recruiting are armed (Caes. BGall. 8.22). Meanwhile, among the Celtiberians, we have less detail and aren’t told that weapons are key to political participation, but what we do see is a repeated pattern where the Romans are negotiating and appear to be making progress, only to demand that, as part of whatever peace negotiation that the Celtiberians lay down their arms: in all but the most desperate of cases, this produces immediate angry rejection from the Celtiberians – Florus has the Celtiberians quip that to surrender their weapons would “be like cutting off their own hands” (App. Hisp. 31, 95; Diod. Sic. 33.16; Florus 1.34.18).
And of course in the archaeological record of all three societies we see weapons in burials, a point we’ll get back to in just a moment. So these guys are showing up with their weapons and gear and they probably don’t expect to be paid to serve their own civitas (serving someone else as mercenaries is another matter!).
At the muster/public assembly, it seems like there are two main tasks for the whole community to vote on. First, they have to ratify the senate or principes decision to go to war in the first place (Livy 32.30.6; Caes. BGall. 5.56.3; Tac. Germ 11-12) and second, they may have to select a leader for the effort. Presumably for civitates that have either a king or a supreme magistrate that can leave the borders of the state (the Aedui Vergobret, for instance, cannot – he’s a purely internal figure) the position may default to them. But one habit we see really clearly especially in Celtiberia is the election of a general, seemingly for a campaign: the Arevaci’s election of Carus in 153, followed by their election of Ambo and Leuco as joint generals after his death (App. Hisp. 45, 46) or the Lusitanians electing Viriathus in 147 (App. Hisp. 62) and his replacement Tantalus (App. Hisp. 75) all seem to show examples where the muster is called first, war is decided on and then a leader for the war immediately elected (note also Florus 1.33.17 on the importance of Celtiberian and Lusitanian war-leaders). Certainly even when we can’t see how the war-leader is selected, our sources have no problem identifying a single individual or at most a pair, generally directing a given campaign. These are not leaderless hordes, they’re organized armies.
And at this point with the men and equipment mustered, the war declared and a leader chosen, the civitas‘ army can proceed to war. It’s clear that precisely because horizontal aristocratic networks stretched over multiple civitates, a civitas going to war is likely to try to call in its neighbors, so running in parallel to these activities might be either personal or communal diplomatic overtures to try to form broader coalitions, which are very common in the warfare of these societies.
So we’ve raised our army, now we want to ask what kind of army have we raised?
Aristocrats, Common Warriors and The Great Change
And this is a question the answer to which is subject to pretty clear chronological variation which we can actually see relatively clearly in the archaeological evidence: who fights and thus what the army looks like pretty clearly begins shifting starting around the fourth or third centuries. Goodness, it is nice to be back at a question archaeology can answer with some confidence, so we’re not just entirely reliant on our textual sources. The key evidence here are changing patterns of weapon deposition in Gallic and Celtiberian contexts, which suggest similar shifts in the composition of the armies this system is producing.
We see this shift earlier in Spain among the Celtiberians (and the coastal Iberians as well). In the fifth century, our archaeological evidence is broadly dominated by what are clearly aristocratic burials – individual burials with prestige goods. The panoply they come with matches: shields with wide bronze bosses that cover most of the wooden core of the shield, cuirasses made of a harness composed of a half-dozen bronze discs linked together, metal-crested helmets and bronze greaves. It’s a lot heavier than what we see later, but it’s also clearly more expensive. In short, most of the weapon deposits we see are confined to the burials of what seem to be Big Men, suggesting an aristocratic focus in warfare: you have a class with weapons (by this point, iron weapons, but much of the armor is still in easier-to-work-into-complex-shapes bronze) who does most of the fighting.
But as we get into the fourth and third centuries in Celtiberia, these smaller aristocratic burial groups are supplemented (and in many cases, replaced) by much larger cemeteries with a lot more and a lot simpler burials, which nevertheless often contain weapons. At the same time, the extravagant parts of the aristocratic panoply just drop away: the disc-cuirasses and metal-crested helmets drop away, the latter replaced, it seems, by helmets of organic materials (leather or textile), as do the bronze greaves (literary sources report greaves of hide or hair, e.g. Diod. Sic. 5.33.3). So we evidently have a wider slice of society bearing arms, but the equipment they have is a lot humbler, which suggests a broadening of the fighting class. And that fits, as we’ll see, with what we can tell from army figures: by the time the Romans are fighting these guys in the late third and second centuries, we’re seeing mobilizations that suggest these societies can put a huge proportion of their military-aged male population under arms.4
And we see a similar progression in the La Tène material culture sphere, particularly in Gaul proper occurring a bit later, starting in the mid-third century. Once again, depositions of military equipment expands, both into humbler grave sites but also into communal ritual sites, like the massive deposits at Gournay-sur-Aronde and Ribemont-sur-Ancre as well as the site of La Tène itself. But where the Celtiberian aristocrats seem to have adopted fancy versions of the humbler panoply (which they used on horseback), in the La Tène material culture sphere, we see a pretty clear distinction between the aristocratic panoply and the equipment these new, poorer warriors seem to have. ‘Chieftain’ burials frequently feature metal helmets, often decorated, and sometimes feature mail armor, whereas most warriors appear to clearly lack both.
And that bears out in our other evidence (textual, representational). While the basic elements of the kit (the La Tène shield, sword, spear and possibly javelins) was shared, the gap between the aristocrat and the common warrior grew to be enormous. The Big Man on his horse likely had a fine iron helmet (often very well decorated) and wore very expensive mail armor; his sword was probably a fine piece of pattern-welded steel. Next to him, on foot, the common warrior had, at best, a textile defense for his head and body – if he wore any armor at all – and a sword that imitated the shape of the aristocrat’s weapon, but without the quality of the metal. Surely there were some fellows in between, but even a very basic thing like metal helmets only get passably common in non-aristocratic contexts in the first century and even then the ‘low end’ of these types (things like the ‘Coolus’ type helmet) are very humble indeed. This too suggests a broadening of the fighting class and like the Celtiberians, by the second century Gallic peoples are putting out armies that suggest they can field a large proportion of their military-aged males.5
On the one hand, this is an object which really shows the kind of wealth an aristocratic Big Man might have: someone commissioned an artisan (probably Greek) to make this fantastically opulent gold brooch depicting a Gallic warrior. On the other hand, the warrior himself wears no body armor. Just the helmet (a Gallic ‘Montefortino’ type) marks him as well-to-do – it’s fairly clear most Gallic warriors couldn’t even afford that much.
So we have what seems to be a transition from an early period where the army likely consisted of just the aristocrats and some of their core retainers, to the point where those aristocrats are mobilizing their peasant clients en masse to create truly mass armies that field most of the manpower in the civitas. Why the change? Obviously, we cannot be certain, but it is easy to see a few factors pushing in this direction. One is simply technology: iron is a cheap, whereas bronze was expensive. The shift to iron weapons thus enabled putting swords and spears (and not much else!) in the hands of more men. There’s also pressure: the anarchic conditions of warfare in the non-state zone which will have pressured aristocrats and their civitates to militarize in order to survive.
But perhaps more decisive was the pressure of encroaching state societies with large, bureaucratically organized armies. For Gallic and Celtiberian peoples, starting in the sixth century, they had Greek, Carthaginian and later Roman communities knocking on their doors – that pressure starts relatively light and distant and intensifies over time and it comes sooner and stronger in Spain, which may explain a bit of the chronology here. Our non-state civitates are smaller societies (the largest tribal civitates are probably something like a tenth the size of the Roman or Carthaginian republics in population) but also much poorer, because they’re not yet very urbanized and don’t have a lot of specialized, non-agricultural labor. But they can compete (more or less) if they get everyone onto the field of battle. So that is what they do.
The result of all of this are armies that are, ironically more stratified by equipment than the state-based armies they fight, despite the fact that those imperial states have far more stratified civilian hierarchies (if just because an imperial elite in Rome or Carthage could be much richer than any Gallic or Celtiberian aristocrat). The gap is most obvious in the Gallic context, as noted above: a Gallic aristocrat on his horse was one of the most technologically advanced, expensive soldiers anywhere on his contemporary battlefield, matching the equipment of the fanciest elite cavalry in the Mediterranean. But his client, unarmored, on foot, was drastically more poorly equipped than the line infantry of a Roman or Hellenistic army (or the small African core of a Carthaginian one). In Spain the picture isn’t quite so dramatic because the aristocrats also adopted the lighter panoply, but the gap in quality is still significant and we certainly see what must have been ‘rich man’s’ weapons in things like the soliferreum, an ‘all iron’ javelin that at some point I should probably discuss in depth.
Nor are these lightly equipped common warriors employed as some sort of flexible skirmishing or support force, the way the larger states of the Mediterranean generally used light infantry. Instead, they’re employed very much as line infantry, going toe-to-toe with the heavy infantry formations of the more urbanized states, which often means going head-on against opponents in heavy armor. It’s striking that when these fellows show up as mercenaries in those large state armies – which they often do – they show up employed as ‘mediums,’ holding the flanks of the real heavy infantry, but the Celtiberians and Gauls don’t have any real heavy infantry, so when they fight as part of a civitas army, these common unarmored warriors are the main line of battle. Notably, we don’t really see the aristocrats employed in these armies to create blocks of true heavy infantry: if we see the wealthy elite as a distinct force on the battlefield, it is because they are on horseback (where they make fairly good cavalry – generally they perform quite better than Roman equites, for instance). I suspect the reason is simple: no Gallic civitas has enough men who can afford armor to make up an intentional core block of truly heavy infantry to anchor the rest of the army around – but a striking force of heavy cavalry (much smaller!) they can do.
I suspect this, in turn, leads to the topos in the ancient literature for the Gauls in particular of the fierce onset of their first charge, but often lacking the ability to endure or stay in the fight if things do not initially go their way. That makes a lot of sense: the Gallic or Celtiberian warrior has very lethal weapons! We’ve discussed La Tène weapons before – they’re quite effective! The same can be said for the weapons of the Celtiberian Meseta (the Romans gleefully adopt their sword and also their dagger, the pugio). But most of these guys have basically no armor or just very basic textile defenses, so if the morale shock and initial (mostly psychological) impact of their initial charge doesn’t disorder the enemy or sweep them away, the resulting attrition is going to go very badly for them, especially against Romans whose army is designed for that attrition. What Greek and Roman sources interpret as a barbaric lack of culture and forethought (e.g. Vitruvius 6.1.10) may actually have been a fairly sensible response to the tactical conditions at hand.
Fighting Rome With the Army You Have
Now of course we know that these fellows are largely going to lose. The Romans will end up conquering Celtiberia in the second century and almost the whole of the La Tène in the first century, so one by one this brilliant kaleidoscope of polities is going to vanish into the growing Roman Republic, soon to become the Roman Empire. The Germani, by dint of distance and logistics will fair a little better, but Rome is going to maintain the fairly clear dominant position on the Rhine-Danube frontier for several centuries and it won’t be until the Germani are forming into much larger polities in Late Antiquity that they’re really able to challenge thatdominant position, the occasional victory (most notably Teutoburg Forest) not withstanding.
But of course nobody could really hold off Roman armies in the third, second and first centuries. The powers that did, be they the peoples east and north of the Rhine and Danube or the Parthians or the peoples to the south like the Garamantes or the Kingdom of Kush dis so in part because they were really far from the Mediterranean, forcing the Romans to operate on the outer edge of communications and logistics. And even then, when the Romans made concerted campaigns, they tended to win, even if they couldn’t then secure and control such distant places.
Instead, what I want to note here is that the non-state polities of Celtiberia and Gaul (and the Germani) punched wildly above their weight in this period. After all these are small polities. Estimating their total population is a bit of educated guesswork, but they’re clearly small. Population density estimates for all of Celtiberia suggest a total population (all ages, male and female) ranging from 155,000 to 310,000 split between something like 10 civitates, though the Arevaci seem to have been quite large, perhaps as much as all of the others put together.6 That fits with Diodorus Siculus who claims roughly that the tribes of Gaul range from 50,000 to 200,000 in size (Diod. Sic. 5.25.1); Caesar gives the pre-war population of the Helvetii at 263,000 (Caes. BGall. 1.29). Pliny offers the post-conquest population of a few Spanish civitates too: 240,000 for the Astures, 166,000 in Lucus and 175,000 for the Bracari (Plin. HN 3.3.28). So the largest these polities tend to get is in the 200-300,000 range, with many smaller ones being quite a bit smaller (from Caesar’s reports of the military strength of groups in Gaul, I think its clear many of the weaker civitates are probably in the bottom of the range Diodorus is suggesting).
By contrast, Roman Italy probably has a population in this period of 3-3.5 million; Carthage’s imperial domains might be around 4 million and Ptolemaic Egypt is around the same. The Antigonids, the runt of the imperial litter, are probably around 3 million, while the Seleucids, the monster of the bunch probably peaks above 15 million.
Why are these non-state polities so much smaller? Precisely because they’re non-state: their structure is personalistic based on relationships of friendship, marriage, kinship and hospitality between aristocrats and then the client-network of those aristocrats and there is a limit to how large personalistic non-state polities can become while remaining stable. Because the system is personalistic, very capable and charismatic leaders can push past these limits from time to time (often far past), but when they die, the limits generally reassert themselves through a range of mechanics. Sometimes it is partible inheritance leading to fragmentation, or simply the inability of a less charismatic leader to manage all of the personal relationships on which the system depends, or the simple impermanence of a polity based on a person that straight-up ceases to exist when that person dies. The institutions of states can be durably scaled in a way the personal systems of non-state polities generally cannot be.
And yet despite this huge size disparity, the Gauls and Celtiberians are often able to hold their own. Heck, Gauls and Celtiberians manage what none of the great states of the eastern Mediterranean could: they manage at points to defeat Roman field armies. The Celtiberians indeed manage it several times, largely holding off Roman power from 181 to 133 (when the Romans finally win out). A group of Gauls, the Galatians (much later to get a Letter from Paul), manage to crash through Greece beginning in 281, smash a Hellenistic army lead by Ptolemy Ceraunus, cross the Hellespont and set up shop permanently in the center of Anatolia, where they are contained but not pushed out by the Seleucids in the late 270s (where they substantially Hellenize).
They do this by fielding what are actually quite respectably sized armies. Livy reports a Celtiberian muster in 182 of some 35,000 warriors (Livy 40.30.1) which I don’t think is wholly made up: the Roman commander in the theater reacted with caution, not a trait one generally associates with Roman generals unless they are, in fact, badly outnumbered (and sometimes not even then). The army of the Helvetii at Bibracte, Caesar claims, was some 92,000 (with elements from five civitates) – this figure we might view with more skepticism (Caes. BGall 1.29), but it is clear from his battle narrative the force was quite large. Polybius reports the combined force of the Gaesatae, Insubres and Boii to have been around 70,000 and while, again, we might be skeptical, the Romans send both consular armies against it, so I actually think that number may be more or less accurate (Polyb. 11.31-33). We haven’t discussed the coastal Iberians very much here – the evidence as to if they have a similar system of recruitment is inconclusive (there isn’t much of it) – but they may and they also are capable of huge mobilizations, providing, inter alia, about half of all Carthaginian manpower during the Second Punic War.7 Calculated as ‘mobilization rates,’ these fellows are putting anywhere from 8-25% of their total population on the battlefield, which is to say anywhere from one-third to ::checks notes:: all of their military-aged males.8 The similar total-population-mobilization figures, by the by, for imperial polities not named ‘the Roman Republic’ range from something like 0.5% to around 4.5%.9
Of course the only way for polities of this size to field armies that can compete with the big imperial powers is to mobilize everyone. And as we’ve seen, they’ve developed a mobilization system – organized around personal ties of loyalty to the aristocracy – to do exactly this. It doesn’t scale, it isn’t extensive, but it pulls a very high proportion of the total resources of the society: it is intensive. These polities compete by putting everything they have, all of the men, all of the metal, on the field all at once to come up to parity with what larger states can field. And often, it works! These societies can mobilize a large amount of their resources and the ‘overhead’ of administration and bureaucracy, the ‘deadweight loss’ of more bureaucratic state systems, is effectively zero. These are polities which are ‘all tooth, no tail‘ at the social level and that lets them put outsized armies (compared to their tiny size) in the field.
Now that came with some fairly major downsides. One was that these armies and societies could be really brittle: if they lost a major battle badly, that was basically all they had. They might be able to reconstitute over years as a new generation came of age (assuming the society wasn’t migrating – in cases where a migrating host of Gauls gets checked hard, it tends to cease to exist because the women and children are caught in the defeat), but there is very little strategic depth here. They could also be brittle in another way: because the system was personalistic, the death of the person holding together a larger coalition could cause its swift collapse, as we see with the deaths of figures like Viriathus, Correus and Idutiomarus.
But another disadvantage is precisely that huge divide between the very well equipped aristocrats and the quite poorly equipped line infantry: these societies are fielding everyone, but lack the bureaucracy to systematically redistribute weapons and arms to (or shift military costs away from) the poorer men being fielded. By contrast, the Roman Republic has a few structures that serve to raise the equipment ‘floor’ on the heavy infantry: the very poor serve as screening light infantry velites not expected to fight in close combat, soldiers are paid a (very small, but extant) wage raised based on the tributum, a land tax where large landholders are going to pay more and the habit of creating colonies in conquered areas with land divisions designed to maximize the amount of heavy infantrymen they could field. Even more than this these non-state societies are not just smaller, they’re also poorer and it shows: they just have less metal for armor and weapons and what they have is, as a result, more concentrated among the handful of very wealthy Big Men.
So when these societies stretch to field absolutely everyone, that means loading up the army with a ton of troops with very little armor and expecting them to hold the line because there’s simply no one else available to do it. Now I should note that these non-state people aren’t just relatively light on armor compared to the Romans (the Romans are unusually heavily armored in this period compared to everyone), but even compared to the Hellenistic states and probably compared to the heavy infantry Carthage raises in Africa (though we have less information there), who are in turn a little light compared to the Romans.
Of course the problem these non-state peoples faced was the Roman Republic, a state which could come close to matching their levels of militarization, but which was more than ten times the size of the largest non-state civitas. With that absolutely massive resource base, the Romans would flatten every Mediterranean society, able to wage war with large, absurdly well-equipped armies on multiple fronts simultaneously at great logistical distance. If you are asking, “wait, how did they do that?” – well, my book project is called Of Arms and Men: Why Rome Always Won. I am finishing the manuscript now, so we might see it in print in 2025 (with Oxford University Press, where it is under contract).
What I find most striking about the tale of Celtiberia and especially Gaul, though, are the signs that these were societies in relatively early stages of state formation: they were moving towards the solution, which would have been to form a polity kind of like Rome to hold off the Romans. We see early urbanization (into oppida) in both regions in this period, as well as the emergence of larger coalitions that might have developed eventually into larger-scale polities and then states. We also see the beginnings of bureaucracy and administration among the Helvetii and Aedui in Gaul, albeit just the beginnings. Given time, these societies seemed to be on a similar road as Rome had been on in the 500s and 400s, forging a path towards a centralized state capable of impressive mobilizations.
They may have just needed a few centuries (we may get some sense of how long by looking at the Germani, who still take quite a while to form those larger kingdoms and tribal confederations). There simply wasn’t time: the Romans were there now and the Gallic and Celtiberian societies were subsumed into the Roman state.
- Wow, a series that actually finished with the originally planned number of parts. It can be done!
- And the iuvenes presumably want conflict because they have the most to gain from it, establishing their wealth and influence through successful military action, as well as ‘proving themselves’ among the aristocracy. By contrast, the seniores and senatores have far less to gain: they share all of the peril – they clearly still fight (see Caes. BGall. 2.28 where the Nervii lose basically their entire senate in a disasterous battle) – but don’t need a war to make their wealth or reputation.
- But mere organization does not make a state! Many MMORPG guilds are extremely organized, but with no capacity for real world violence, they are not states (although I suddenly wonder about some EVEOnline Alliances attempting to employ real world force…)
- On these features (in English, at least), see Quesada Sanz Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), 49-57 and M. Almagro-Gorbea and A.J. Lorrio. “War and Society in the Celtiberian World” E-Keltoi 6 (2004).
- While I have quite a few quibbles with the book generally, this is actually a point that G. Canestrelli, Celtic Warfare: From the Fifth Century BC to the First Century AD (2022) demonstrates pretty well in a lay-person-friendly kind of way. The trend is also noted in Brunaux, and Lambot. Armement et Guerre chez les Gaulois (1987) and Deyber, Les Gaulois en Guerre: Stratégies, tactiques et techniques Essai d’histoire militaire (IIe/Ier siècles av. J.-C.) (2009), but, of course, in French. It also comes out pretty clearly in the data from Pleiner, The Celtic Sword (1993), but Pleiner doesn’t really bring out the implication as that’s not the focus of the book.
- Quesada Sanz, F. “Los Celtíberos y la Guerra: tácticas, cuerpos, efectivos y bajas. Un análysis a partir de la campaña del 153.” In Segeda y sui context histórico. Entre Catón y Nobilior (195 al 153 a.C.), edited by F. Burillo, 149-178. Zaragoza: Fundación Segeda, 2006.
- On this, see Taylor (2020), 68-70.
- We should expect adult males to make up something like a quarter of the total population of most societies in this period.
- The Roman Republic, depending on how one does the math, is 6-8%, because the Romans are bonkers.
Between this and the previous two entries in the series, I will say this much: I only saw anarchism (let’s set aside the exact definitions for a moment) as a potentially viable way of organizing a society after I read through a book on the law systems of, ahem, non-state agrarian societies of “Barbarian Europe”.
It’s kind of pity that as far as I could tell, any time that an anarchist sympathizer appeared in the comments, the discussion quickly moved away from theory and towards the failures of socialism. I’d like a committed anarchist to show up and provide a detailed commentary, a sort of compare-and-contrast between what’s described here and what they envision. I’ve read these fellows have a bunch of interesting examples drawn from non-state societies around the world (Benedict Anderson and James C. Scott come to mind).
Or, maybe, we could leave discussions of moderns political ideology and how ideologues imagine a past Utopia outside of a blog about ancient history?
Nope, everything is political. I’m truly sorry that you live in a rapidly progressing and disintegrating world where the collapse of traditional systems of power and lifestyle are obtrusive and omnipresent, but you do. There is no escape in any magistra and ignoring the political implications of a topic is impossible.
I am 26, and I am very confident that no, Western society will not collapse in my lifetime. It’s fine that you do, but don’t act like it’s an objective fact. Save it for /r/collapse.
Western society already collapsed. It’s always been collapsing. There’s no society to collapse and no society to not collapse.
My point isn’t that we’re in a special time, it’s that everything has always been political and always will be. The privilege to talk of separate magistra, to segregate politics from history or science or urban planning, is an extremely privileged one built on a very specific confluence of conditions that was *never* real, just the specific cultural zeitgeist of a particular class in a particular region. That zeitgeist is already dead, if it ever insulated these topics to begin with, which it didn’t.
The truth is that historiography has always been political. Ancient histories are as much social commentary as synthesis of fact, the historiography of the 1900’s and earlier was full of rhetoric that would be used to justify fascism, vanguardism, and other forms of totalitarian ideology, and the historical teachings of state education are extremely political and often full of politically useful lies.
It is both willfully ignorant and suicidally disarming to not only ignore but devalue the political implications of a topic given that others won’t. [I]You[/I] can choose not to engage, that’s a choice about your priorities I have no desire to judge, but the idea that engagement is wrong is idiotic. You don’t get a special enlightened place separate from politics, there’s no safe space that isn’t engaged, you’re here in the muck of a chaotic world with the rest of us.
Funny, that’s the claim that’s been made for over a century. Many of those who were declared the obvious successor to this system have vanished entirely, and lo, the system still trundles on.
Literally no idealogy can claim the system is pristine in even the most atomized sense. The system of society isn’t a pyramid crafted to stand which can crumble, it’s a messy ball of muscular bricks smashed together by an incomprehensibly vast array of political forces, which incidentally forms metastable configurations. These systems have edges, rough spots, sticking points and flaws, and will always break into different configurations as forces change. Anyone who promises or even advocates for a stable system is lying to your face.
In other words, this has been said since prehistory about the oral traditions of cave dwellers. And it’s been right the entire time. Everything is always political and the system is never stable.
This foundation does not support your original claim.
I never said that our society was special, just that everything is political and rapidly and violently changing. This is, was, and will always be true, and it’s always going to be valid and important to consider the political ramifications of historical societies on your own as everyone navigates this transformation. Everyone’s done it since the earliest histories and will continue to do so.
By the by, our society is special because there’s so many of us, which probably makes things change faster, but not that they do as this isn’t relevant to my point.
Jumping to a new foundation only makes it clearer that you can not support your original claim. Especially when that one does not support it, either.
Systems that are capable of accommodating changing conditions without breaking down are, by definition, reasonably stable. No system can accommodate all possible changes (if the Earth asplodes, all Earthly systems are over). But systems there is a large and clear difference between those that can adapt and those which collapse.
Finally, I take it as a settled fact that the kind of person who walks around declaring that Everything is Political may, with remarkable precision, simply be ignored as they will be adding nothing of value to any conversation.
Mary, if you’re going to mischaracterize my own statements and ignore my clarification you can kindly go fuck yourself as well. This is a truly pathetic dodge if your only goal is to refute me, because you’re just revealing your own ignorance and biases.
Civile, you can be safely ignored too, then. Because I am fully confident you aren’t actually ignoring me and that you’re just angry that my statement challenges views you secretly know you can’t defend, I will engage with the meaningful part of your critique.
Systems do, in fact, accommodate change, but only by changing. In this context, that means being willing to adopt other tools of power.
In the context of this debate the op is refusing to engage with the idea that this past system has lessons to teach us about how we should change this one. The anti intellectual desire to segregate magistra of knowledge from politics doesn’t serve to help us influence how the system changes, it just lets the most uninformed wacks dominante the debate.
To bring this to a shared ground, hence talk about how Sparta is egalitarian, a topic that *still* shows up as the topic of books, websites, movies, blogs, and other avenues of pop culture and which has real social impact. Anyone who follows the blog understands that this *is* political and *is* wrong, deeply so.
People who think *this* system of power should be emulated would go for a system of patronage based aristocrats. Engaging with the topic shows that there’s absolutely no reason to like that-it isn’t ruler-less, the rulers just aren’t a state, so it lacks the appeal of anarchy. That insight matters.
Given that there are actually people making that mistake, yes, talking about this matters and yes, everything is political.
“Systems do, in fact, accommodate change, but only by changing. In this context, that means being willing to adopt other tools of power.”
That claim needs some support.
@dcmmm, your discussions here always make me think about interesting questions, thanks for that. There’s two that stick out now. First, I agree with you that everything has political implications, but how do get from there to the idea that every discussion or every forum even should center politics? Maybe I’m representing you wrong, but I think the question is less about whether ancient societies have political implications today and more about whether this is the place to discuss them. Second, do you notice that a fair few of your conversations here end with you saying “fuck off, you’re not worth talking to”, and does that ever bother you?
Oh, that one’s simpler, everywhere will center politics insomuch as politics exists as a field of discussion. The idea there are correct places to discuss topics was designed by the devil to kill you. If a topic has political implications then talk about them.
And I most of my discussions don’t end that way. I’m just one of the few people here who will bother cutting through subtle ways of telling someone to fuck off and just say it. Mischaracterization of what someone said, lying to their face about their own words to discredit listening to them, *is* fuck you. There’s no engaging with anti thought and it’s inherently profane. Might as well just treat it as what it is.
Given that some of the people whom I’ve engaged with hostility have shown themselves to be literally the worst kind of people, I don’t worry about it at all.
So, your anti-thought should not be engaged with?
Hey, Mary, here’s an actual question; do you know what words mean? Are you illiterate? I might be treating you unfavorably, which I’d feel bad about. I’m presuming you’re willfully choosing to be stupid, not legitimately incapable of reading.
Like that.
You seem to be using the word “collapse” in a rather idiosyncratic way. Would you mind providing a definition?
The way I would define a “collapse” of a system (physical or political) would be something along the lines of “a rapid change from a low-entropy state to a higher entropy state”. However, you seem to think that low-entropy states don’t actually exist in political systems, so it’s not clear to me what a “collapse” would mean in that context.
I actually agree completely that if there is a low entropy state we can’t definitively say so from here; I might want to believe that an anarchist utopia is “stable” but that flies in the face of history.
Rather there are metastable configurations, states of relative low entropy where society can rest, certain mixes of different systems of power. Capital can own factories, but the state imposes regulations. Workers have no universal safety net, but their wages are effectively multiplied by a factor and sequestered into an investment fund. These systems are formed by political forces and movements and don’t create stability, but in the same way a stuck gear will hold an assembly in position they’re metastatic, they provide the appearance of stability.
The inconsistencies of these systems are always building for the same reasons systems change throughout history-technology changes, young people grow up with different zeitgeists from their parents, class inequality or regional variations create strife, etc.
This inevitably collapses the system into a new configuration as some bulwark breaks. Awareness of this let’s is at least pretend to guide the ongoing collapse/building of society into something we want, but it’s prone to spiraling out of control into violence if a big enough pillar breaks. I see a violent collapse in our future, but collapse is always happening.
Comparing, say, Germany in 1946 and the United States today, I have no trouble saying that we are in a low-entropy state relative to other historical configurations.
dcmorinmorinmorin I’m not sure there’s any actual difference between what you call a metastable/metastatic state, and what I’d simply call a low-entropy state (the most stable state of any system is always the highest-entropy, hence any low-entropy state can only be at best metastable), although this may simply be where the analogy to physics breaks down.
To focus on a more concrete question, earlier you spoke of “the collapse of traditional systems of power and lifestyle”. When you said this, did you mean it only in the sense that they are always “collapsing” all the time (although in that case, how does it even make sense to talk about “traditional” systems)?
Or were you making a stronger claim, that these systems are currently “collapsing” in a way that’s much more severe than the normal background change that’s always happening? In that case, you and I disagree; I don’t think our current system is collapsing in that sense, nor do I think it’s likely to in the near future (say, the next decade). I think our system is quite resilient for its level of entropy, when compared against historical averages. You may protest that this is merely the appearance of stability, rather than “true” stability but, as far as political systems go, I’m not convinced there’s actually any difference between the 2.
Comparing Germany in 1930 and the US today we are precisely as unstable in the same ways. Distrust of the system, particularly amongst people under 30, is pretty much universal, in contradictory ways.
More basically we absolutely live in a society where there are certain systems which became ossified and have the appearance of tradition. In American politics these are neoliberal and neocon power bases, which have been well buttressed by population demographics and are now incredibly out of date, and which just aren’t changing peacefully. And I agree that traditional isn’t accurate, but that’s because tradition isn’t a real thing; it’s a persistent cultural mirage based on biases. But that mirage is both incredibly fragile and a motivating factor for change, so talking about it still matters.
My point was never to say caring is contingent on us being in a special catastrophy though, even though I think we are. My point was that we always need to be open to talking about it; the movement to silence political discussion in intellectual fields always pops up when the system is about to change in a big way, and shutting up is always the wrong choice.
Perhaps it’ll help make sense of my position if I say I’m a geologist whose been screaming about global warming and evolution for my entire life whilst being silenced by politicians saying climate change is a political discussion and that teaching kids to believe in evolution steps on separate magistra. I’m thoroughly hate pilled on anyone telling academics to stay out of a political or idealogical realm.
No, I do not believe that our current situation is comparable to that of a country that had just lost a World War and was going through the Great Depression.
Also, I’m not sure what systems were “ossified and ha[d] the appearance of tradition” in 1930 Germany, considering that its system of government was…barely over a decade old at that point.
“Comparing Germany in 1930 and the US today we are precisely as unstable in the same ways. Distrust of the system, particularly amongst people under 30, is pretty much universal”
This is simply nonsense. A German in 1930, looking back at the last 15 years of his country’s history, would have seen the following:
– Complete defeat in an extremely bloody world war
– Famine and impoverishment due to a blockade
– The occupation by an alliance of hostile foreign powers of the key industrial heartland
– The annexation, by one of them, of a large chunk of territory
– Widespread mutiny in the armed forces
– An attempted Communist revolution
– Hyperinflation
– The collapse of the currency and its replacement with a different currency
– Multiple high-profile political assassinations
– Multiple attempted extreme-right and extreme-left coups, including at least one which involved entire formations of an officially non-existent and illegal branch of the armed forces
Stick to geology.
As you can. Imagine, telling me to stick to my field, throwing an earnest attempt to build understanding in my face to satisfy your biases, isn’t exactly persuasive.
So fuck you gargle shit water you entitled prick. If that seems extreme, learn respect.
Ben, the key is that in public perception the system of power has lost the same legitimacy. I’ve said this before here but I don’t think people understand how much the 2008 crisis killed faith in society for anyone who grew up during or after it. The younger generations, particularly those living in cities where rents are insane or suburbs where home prices are psychotic (and their families may have lost a hone within a generation) absolutely hate, purely hate, anyone they think is responsible for what happened.
That righteous hatred is the same stuff that preceded the rise of German fascism after the world war and wall street collapse. There were more shocks in Germany, but there’s been a longer time for people to decide the system can’t address their grievances here.
It’s been a slow roll, but the rhetoric is legitimately reaching a fever pitch.
The ossification is that systems of legal reform aren’t looked to as solutions for problems. Half the government is paralyzing reform and actively arguing for violence and the other half are just trying to keep the lights on, even if the lights are killing people. One of the main branches of government has been hijacked by extremists who get to squat there until they die. People are legitimately losing their minds looking for alternatives to the rigged system they’re in, via willful engagement with crypto ponzi schemes and futurist techno cults. When they aren’t just joining death cults in open far right spaces, or committing acts of terrorism or riot.
It’s similar.
Also still not relevant to my point, it doesn’t need to be for caring to matter. It could be that bad next decade, or the one after that. If you’re going to just look for reasons to ignore me just do what that other jackass did and belittle me, or disengage. As pertains to this, the core question is this-do you think the system is changing or will need to change in your lifetime, and that old systems can or will influence how people try to change it? If so talking about the political implications of those historical systems matters.
dcmorinmorinmorin I did, in fact, grow up in the wake of 2008, and while I am not American, I do live in an Anglosphere country with very close ties to the US and which faces many of the same problems (Canada). I do not get the impression that my generation is, by and large, eager to join the brownshirts.
As for the rest, look, if you’re going to make a provocative claim (i.e. the world is disintegrating and traditional systems of power are collapsing), don’t be surprised if that’s what people focus on. If it isn’t important to your main point then, well, perhaps do not make provocative claims that are irrelevant to your argument.
But as to that main point, I am actually in agreement that discussions about how the political structures of these past societies relate to modern day ideologies are appropriate for this comment section (although, seeing how said discussions have played out, I’m starting to reconsider). So maybe we should simply leave it at that.
It’s not the brown shirts, they’re also highly socialist leaning. But it’s clear from what data we have that belief in any form of the establishment is rapidly eroding. How they break from it depends.
The brown shirts are actually the older generations, by the by. I’m speaking of the younger ones because it’s easier to convince people given their biases that young people are acting “irrationally” as a response to a few triggers, but in truth the past decades broke everyone. I don’t even think it’s an irrational reaction, but people who disagree need to understand that it’s still real.
The provocative claim is correct. It’s also important to make. If, like you, people don’t realize it yet, they need to be mentally prepared for the truth of it. I’m not trying to make people happy, and I know this’ll trigger a lot of just world fallacies and hence hostility. Nobody likes to hear that the world is wrong in a way they need to solve and which speaks badly about an identity they belong too.
As far the vulgarity; that’s also a choice. There’s a little bit of inoculation as a tactic, but I won’t be too pretentious; I just like equating subtle vileness with open vulgarity. If someone wants to say something repugnant, but coach it in cute euphemism or bury it as an ad hominem jab, they can deal with the vulgarity. It’s more honest and means the same thing. And if nothing else, let it convince you that politics actually is fucked right now. This happens everywhere and always will until something changes, this is life now.
Well, if it is in fact an important argument to make, then please drop this air of condescending exasperation where you act as if anyone who makes an counter-argument to it is missing the point, or “look[ing] for reasons to ignore” you.
Counterargument: I don’t care.
“Imagine, telling me to stick to my field, throwing an earnest attempt to build understanding in my face to satisfy your biases, isn’t exactly persuasive.”
If you made an earnest attempt to build understanding at any point, you must have typed it really, really quietly, because I missed it. You seem to have a very strongly rooted self-image as a bold, honest truth-teller who understands politics at a very deep level, but that isn’t backed up by any apparent expertise or knowledge. You make very vague assertions that are really nothing more than clouds of detached metaphor, and when people disagree, you respond with (ungrammatical) insults.
You’re just not a serious person. I admit I do regret telling you to stick to geology, because if this is how you do your actual job as well, you’re probably going to get someone killed in a cave-in or something.
To expand on Ursula le Guin, “The Dispossed” is the novel explicitly comparing an anarchist society with a capitalist. This is part of her future series where space travel exists, but space travel is almost entirely irrelevant to the characters and plot.
I would also add a Scottish science fiction writer and no it isn’t Iain Banks, it is Ken MacLeod. A number of his novels are set in near-future alternatives with various mixes of anarchism, capitalism, and structures I don’t know how to briefly describe. It’s not all one big future, he writes one or a few books in each, then moves on to something different.
“The Fall Revolution” (four books), “Engines of Light” (three), and “Descent” in particular look at different ways our late 20th/early 21st C societies could change.
“To expand on Ursula le Guin, “The Dispossed” is the novel explicitly comparing an anarchist society with a capitalist.”
IIRC, during a famine on anarchist Anarres, the central character serves on a committee that decides how much food each person in the area will get to eat, on utilitarian grounds, and is very much aware that he is helping to decide who will live and who will die.
So Anarres has a power structure that controls the means of subsistence and life or death for everyone, and whose power and authority to do so is unquestioned. I’m not sure that is what most people think of as the system referred to by the word “anarchy”.
Exactly. It’s been a while since I read The Dispossessed, but one of the plot developments is the lead character realising that this “anarchist” society has changed into something else.
To clarify my original comment, neither Ursula le Guin nor Ken MacLeod write utopias. They are science fiction authors. IMHO both are worth reading as plausible thought experiments in alternative ways to organise a society, both positives and negatives.
Anarchy isn’t the same as “lack of rules” or “lack of decisions.” It’s “lack of hierarchies.” If a bunch of anarchists elect a general to lead their army, that general has power of life and death. But the expectation is that when the war ends, the general goes back to being a regular citizen whom you can ignore.
If a large anarchist community elects a food distribution committee, they haven’t stopped being anarchists, until and unless the Food Committee actually tries to leverage its temporary office into a permanent one. Within the anarchists’ minds, the Committee exists to enforce the decision the people (collectively) have already made, not to rule the people and make the decisions itself.
Anarchists don’t see it as a self-ending to anarchy if the anarchists aboard a ship elect a captain and obey him while at sea. The way they use the term, it’s not a problem in their eyes.
(I am not an anarchist, but do like to see them represented fairly)
To expand on what Simon said, which is correct entirely, historical anarchist societies were organized around industrial unions or peasant communes, often coopting the structures there. They cooperated together via councils of various forms.
The main thing that killed the anarchists in terms of organizing was not enough time; things progressed to violence too quickly to build lines of communication and cooperation, preventing them from collaborating. For example during the Russian revolution some of the anarchists ended up in control of cities and tried to establish communal factories, but they didn’t work out how to handle currency. It’s not like that’s beyond the scope of anarchism, but it requires consensus that just can’t be built during war, so the anarchist economy either used local currency or barter.
Meanwhile they successfully rallied after being overrun strategically and marshalled a very competent guerilla army to repel the whites, with limited central planning, almost entirely through peasant communes.
This contrast of extreme competence at hard things and extreme incompetence at easy things is pretty typical.
They still absolutely made communal decisions and had government in that sense, and this includes rationing; peasants are the absolute experts of practical communal food management. They also had communal justice, with all the benefits and pitfalls that brought. The picture of anarchism as an isolating, diffuse system is distinctly American and based on frontier homesteading, which is extremely not scalable.
To be a bit less charitable to the anarchists (I am not an anarchist and there are good reasons for that), one may point out that in some ways, organizing an army is actually simpler than managing an economy. Even if you, say, have them elect their officers, soldiers will tend to fall into line under a command structure if it’s that or die and if the command structure isn’t openly backstabbing or expending them. Ultimately, both the soldiers and the generals and any civilians on the army’s side have a shared interest in the army not losing the war
Figuring out how to get the factories running so that your army is long-term sustainable involves more conflicting interest groups. Army wants more munitions, badly. Workers want shorter hours, badly. Both sides yell. It’s a problem of a type that makes building consensus particularly difficult.
And if you chronically run out of time fussing over such things, your political system becomes unstable.
Figuring out how to get the factories running so that your army is long-term sustainable involves more conflicting interest groups. Army wants more munitions, badly. Workers want shorter hours, badly. Both sides yell. It’s a problem of a type that makes building consensus particularly difficult.
This, exactly. And the problem doesn’t go away when the war is over and you’re less concerned about munitions than about, say, building railroads or housing or any one of a number of other things. In some ways it gets more intractable since people are willing to put up with discipline and privation in wartime- if they see a genuine existential threat- that they might not in peacetime.
I think ‘consensus’ is kind of the wrong goal to seek anyway- people don’t all have the same values, interests or worldviews, and achieving consensus is never going to be possible, the best one can hope for is to achieve a social order that a critical mass of people are willing to accept as tolerable, or as a compromise, or as a tradeoff against worse options. Even in the far future when / if capitalism has been overthrown, I think there is still going to be conflict between economic groups with different relations to the means of production (whether or not you want to call them classes or not), and even if class conflict were somehow ended forever and a permanent socialist order established, you would *still* have ethnoracial, linguistic, and religious differences to fight over.
> Even if you, say, have them elect their officers, soldiers will tend to fall into line under a command structure if it’s that or die and if the command structure isn’t openly backstabbing or expending them.
Xenophon and the Ten Thousand seem like they are a good example of this?
Hence why anarchism tends to be an organizing principle in actual politics, and the people whom actually go about saying “this isn’t Anarchist” tend to be useful idiots. Most people with anarchist leanings are absolutely willing to accept compromise to actually do things, because not starving, dying, or otherwise suffering is more important than being idealogically “pure”.
I do agree that warfare is simpler, on reflection. Anarchists were trying to recreate all the systems of society in a way that wasn’t rife for abuse, which is a Herculean task. That should absolutely influence your opinion of people telling you to be anarchists, precisely because that’s such a radical thing to think is necessary. They’re somewhat vindicated in that the socialist forces that co opted the government basically instantly collapsed into despotism.
It’s possible there was just no good choice in the Russian civil war, you either sided with the least bad tyrant and a quarter of you died, or you sided with the worst and half of you died.
(The obvious solution is not to do civil war)
“Anarchy isn’t the same as “lack of rules” or “lack of decisions.” It’s “lack of hierarchies.” If a bunch of anarchists elect a general to lead their army, that general has power of life and death. But the expectation is that when the war ends, the general goes back to being a regular citizen whom you can ignore.”
Simon, when he left office President Trump reverted to being a regular citizen whom you could ignore. Is the United States therefore an anarchy? What about Canada or Germany? I’m pretty sure that Stephen Harper and Angela Merkel are now regular citizens whom you can ignore. Which countries in the western world are not anarchies by this definition, and why not?
Formerly the constitution complies with anarchist principles in that liberalism is parent to anarchism (and socialism in general), yes. I mean, excepting slavery and that the electoral college and Senate exist, but in principle it was better than what came before.
But step out of the constitutional definitions of power and into the legal and monetary realms and the idea that Trump is just a citizen or that the election process selects a leader democratically is absolutely laughable.
What anarchists want to do is overthrow the systems of power that make that true. This almost universally involves redistributing capital and removing massive amounts of state authority over various spheres.
“Formerly the constitution complies with anarchist principles ….
But step out of the constitutional definitions of power and into the legal and monetary realms and the idea that Trump is just a citizen or that the election process selects a leader democratically is absolutely laughable.”
dcmorinmorinmorin, this suggests that the constitution is fine, its only the citizens that are wrong: they don’t behave the way anarchist theory says they ought to.
If there is one such county, that suggests that anarchist theory does not always lead to the desired results. But there are many countries which appear to follow these principles. The whole of the Western world, in fact.
If we are not going to call them anarchies and instead declare that they too do not behave as theory says they should, than those principles never work.
(And if anarchists major complaint about those countries is that their governments do not do enough to expropriate the wealthy, they picked a misleading name for their movement.)
It’s not the citizenry, or rather it’s no more the citizenry than it always is. It’s the law surrounding the constitution.
The vicious cycle of capitalism is that the state grants or protects a monopoly (or oligarchy) on some form of capital and the capitalists who own it then kickback to those whom represent the state, influencing politics to their own gain. This interaction isn’t covered by constitutional law, but rather the common law of each state and the federal system.
(You could also have the capitalists just declare themselves the state, i.e. manorialism, lest we go down the anarcho capitalist detour to hell).
Just fixing the state isn’t really possible or favorable, the better solution is to keep the capitalist class from existing. This means breaking up all the systems of ownership where a hierarchy exists, all of which are enabled by laws other than the Constitution.
Don’t get me wrong, fixing the systems that lets capital influence politics is also good, but anarchists aren’t naive enough to think that’ll keep new systems from developing. As long as some people own most of the productive wealth *they are an existential threat*, they will find a way to influence society to their interests. It’s just human nature.
That blog about ancient history regularly comments on modern politics, too. And the posts about ancient history often references “anarchy” in the pop-culture chaotic-disorder sense, which is obviously relevant to anarchist, in the same way that a hypothetical Star Wars blog which made erroneous references to real-world animals would be relevant to zoologists. (Only more intense, because most anarchists care more about their ideology than most zoologists care about animal trivia.)
Read some Ursula K. LeGuin. She’s an anarchist; she’s hyper-smart; and she provides some detail.
Her detail, though, usually sucks. Chosen to be literary rather than realistic, ideological rather than self-consistent. Much like her writing, which strings together beautiful sentences into ponderous, plotless, characterless chapters and books.
You might check out “Rocannon’s World”, her first novel. It’s short, and to me reads like a cross between mid-career Le Guin and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
After her first stories, she was hailed as the next Leigh Brackett.
She was my other choice for comparison, but I thought she might be a little obscure. I’m happy to be wrong! 🙂
For those who haven’t seen it, this is a look at the first draft of “The Empire Strikes Back”, after the completion of which, the author sadly died:
https://www.starwarz.com/starkiller/the-empire-strikes-back-first-draft-by-leigh-brackett-transcript/
For a true anarchist, anarchy is not an achievable goal, merely an ethical standard for societies that humanity (as is) will always fail. Anarchy can help you determine how you might change your society to have more justice in it, but humans are not capable of loving justice enough to enact anarchy; anyone who suggests otherwise either lacks in capacity for ideological rigor, or harbors personal aspirations of oligarchy.
“For a true anarchist, anarchy is not an achievable goal, merely an ethical standard for societies that humanity (as is) will always fail”
It’s such a relief to know that, however paradisiacal a country might be, people who want one will always have an excuse for murder and treason.
There’s no justice in murder. “Treason” is a harder case, and I live in a country founded by people who wanted to take the word out of the political vocabulary entirely so paradoxically I would feel treasonous arguing the case either way.
You seem to be reacting to some idea that isn’t part of my comment, but that you brought to the discussion in your own handbag. I’ve been a sounding board for living leftist thought for twenty years now, but clearly you have some knowledge that’s completely alien to me; please tell me what in the heck do you think you’re talking about?
If there is no justice in murder, then any just killing can not have been murder. George Washington’s followers, for example, certainly killed people (that’s what happens in battles) but they surely held that their cause was just and their killings not murderous.
If all possible forms of government can be called unjust, then rebellion against all of them can be justified, and the man who kills to destroy Utopia can honestly declare himself innocent of murder. Utopia, after all, must have been unjust before he destroyed it.
You’re getting closer to an understanding here. Colonial forces did feel that the only way to grow justice in their lives was to fight and kill. And that did lead to the people of the early United States of America having the power to overturn some injustices and the power to enact some injustices themselves.
It was not the ideal way to resolve the situation, violence. Had the participants in that conflict not been humans, perhaps they could have found a way to resolve it without killing.
And certainly, acts of civil disobedience can be justified by people in all human-made polities, because again, humans can dream of a just polity but it is not our nature to make them. I think people should consider the consequences of their actions and not do things like killing someone or collapsing an unjust system all at once resulting in mass death, but because everyone involved in those situations will be a human there may not be better options. Hopefully enough records of the events survive so that future humans can learn and not repeat them.
One of the key differences is that this is a post agricultural non industrial pre mass communication society. In terms of mass organization and material conditions the three biggest changes in history are agriculture, industrialization, and the internet. Wrapped into industrialization is the printing press as well.
First, these Celtic societies aren’t anarchist. The term is being misused. They are nonstate, or certainty weak states, but the presence of aristocrats and big men inherently implies a hierarchy. This isn’t surprising, because agriculture *creates* hierarchy. The math of sustenance leads to it, fir the reasons we’ve seen in part one. Land has variable value, specialists can exist, some forms of capital exist particularly livestock, etc.
The actual anarcho-primitive societies that are used as templates by even mildly sane anarchists are those of the Tepes, the Turkish word for “tell” a form of human built hill, created via repeated inhabitation. These societies had primitive agriculture, architecture, etc., but had largely egalitarian lifestyles centered around family groups. I clarify mildly sane because maternal and child mortality was still horrifyingly high in these societies; anarcho-primitive activists either ignore this, or are just bastard humans. But they were classless, for a time. Eventually walled cities with highly efficient crops and specialists outcompeted them. These state societies required hierarchy as not all specializations are attractive. Or survivable. Mining was basically a death sentence, for instance, and societies that don’t mind metal due to ones that do.
Industrial societies push past this. Because such a small percentage of the population needs to actually farm, literally by a factor of a hundred to a thousand, everyone can be a specialist. We maintain hierarchies because not all specialities are equally rewarding or attractive, but we’ve largely automated out the truly awful jobs. Most current social stratification is thus inherited from state societies. To put it simply there’s nothing inherently more valuable about being a design executive versus being a farmhand, despite the huge disparity in social power. This isn’t to say rewards are arbitrary, but capital is rewarded primarily according to the ability to leverage power and control rather than the value of a job to society.
Modern anarcho-socialists seek to mimic the useful aspects of state societies and the useful aspects of nonstate societies by redistributing capital, which can be broadly defined as transferable productive property, through democratic organization. This is only *possible* because of writing, and only practical because of mass literacy and electronic communication. The larger unified systems of governance and commerce that Celtic societies lacked would be served by councils formed from local representation or direct democracy. That’s how Anarchist societies have organized in the recent past.
This allows personal organization as much as possible and horizontal social networks while letting these clusters interact to form a consensus. Hence law codes, megaprojects, international relations, currency valuation, and regulations can be done with as small of a state as possible while actual rule enforcement, investment, welfare, and health care are done by much more accountable local democracies.
(This is why Anarchists are against states, provinces, and nations, but not per say international organizations and certainly not local government. We need to agree that money has value and need to cooperate to build bridges and to keep slavery illegal, but every intermediary level is viewed as unnecessary and dangerous)
In practice we don’t know if this works. Every time it’s been tried the councils get atomized from each other and exterminated by the state. Either reactionaries kill the anarchists, as happened in the 1800’s, or vanguardist states betray the anarchists and purge them, as happened in the Spanish and Russian revolutions (which got soooo close to establishing an anarchist society). The Soviets and peasant communes were organized in compliance with broad anarchist principles…until Lenin converted them into state bureaucracies or killed them.
That’s why the Internet matters; it’s a powerful, defining tool of mass communication that can potentially prevent this. Alongside extreme paranoia among anarcho-socialists.
Anarcho capitalism doesn’t care about hierarchy until someone calls themselves the government (or, in practice, helps black people, ancaps are almost at least universally racists or just lying Nazis), and would love Celtic society, but they’re idiots so no one cares. Other methods of organizing exist, including some anti internationalist versions of anarchism, but most anarchists would at least agree that the broad outline of power here is *better* than the current one. And some anarchists are against all organization, but they tend to be…naive? Idealogically crazed? Most versions of anarchism that actually exist are compatible with local organization through voting.
I hope this in some way answered your question or at least helps inform further discussion.
For other very old egalitarian societies, the ancient Indus river valley civilizations certainly LOOK very egalitarian based on the archaeology and attempts to identify “priest-kings” and the like seem to be more people trying to apply Mesopotamian models where they don’t belong. Of course that’s far from certain since we don’t have anything but the archaeology. See: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10814-020-09147-9
“Either reactionaries kill the anarchists, as happened in the 1800’s, or vanguardist states betray the anarchists and purge them, as happened in the Spanish and Russian revolutions (which got soooo close to establishing an anarchist society).”
Corrections:
Either reactionaries SURELY kill the anarchists, as happened in the 1800’s AND Spain, or vanguardist states get everything in order, establish hierarchy in the armed forces, central command and decision making to combat the reactionaries effectively, as happened in the Russian revolution (which got soooo close to the Whites and the imperialist interventionists crushing the soviets and restore the Tsarist/Republic regimes).
Possibly true in Spain, certainly not true in the Russian civil war or European century of revolution, which involved much more complex regional variations. The regional anarchist societies of the Russian revolution successfully pushed out the whites, they were *winning*, but then the reds invaded.
This is also ignoring the path not taken where the Bolsheviks could have honored the transfer of power instead of progressively instituting more party control via force. They lost an election and refused to vacate power. The opposition wasn’t, in fact, reactionary; the Bolsheviks refusal is still understandable because of the political complexities involved, but we need not accept the post facto labels as accurate. This was the point of no return for the Bolsheviks actually governing with principles even moderately aligned with anarchism or democratic socialism and it wasn’t inevitable.
“This is also ignoring the path not taken where the Bolsheviks could have honored the transfer of power instead of progressively instituting more party control via force. They lost an election and refused to vacate power.”
Who really ‘won’ the 1917 election and what it said about popular sentiment is kind of murky, considering that 1) by the time the election happened the Socialist Revolutionaries weren’t a single party any more, although the electoral rolles hadn’t been updated to reflect that, 2) we don’t really know how many people would have sympathized with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries vs. the Right Socialist Revolutionaries, 3) the Bolsheviks didn’t really have a presence in the rural areas to get their message out, and 4) the Bolsheviks were at that time promoting ideas about peasant control that they didn’t really believe in (at least, the top leadership didn’t believe in) in order to broaden their support base.
I think we can say though, that whatever the two wings of the Socialist Revolutionary Party represented at that point, neither of them was anarchist, the 1917 election doesn’t represent an expression of popular faith in anarchism, and that if the SR party (left or right) had ended up winning the conflict and taking power, they would absolutely not have created an anarchist utopia / dystopia free of hierarchies, state institutions, government, wages and prices, or whatever else you might be thinking about. I’m sure they would have been less repressive than the Soviet Communists ended up being (either before or after 1956), but I also think they would have been more authoritarian than any liberal western society: you aren’t going to get a revolution without *some* degree of authority and coercion. As lots of revolutionaries, many of them not at all Marxist in any way, shape or form, have learned.
if you disagree with that, then show me an example of an anarchist party that waged a revolutionary conflict and actually *won*.
I agree, mostly. It’s why I’m not a revolutionary, war favors hierarchy and revolution is extremely hard to guide in a way that isn’t extremely dangerous. I also understand why the Bolsheviks didn’t honor the elections, those points are valid, although then opening fire on protestors and escalating to a full purge was still just fully the wrong choice.
It’s possible that the Russian situation in 1917-1921 was just doomed for everyone. Too many malignant forces, not enough resources or time. I don’t believe that, but recognize it’s an article of faith that there had to be a way out.
I also agree that just handing over power wouldn’t magically make Russia an anarchy, but it could have allowed movement in that direction. The Bolsheviks seizing power and instituting party rule effectively calcified the state as an institution, and when it finally broke 60-70 years later it was catastrophic. All collapses are drastic but not all of them are uncontrolled or deadly.
I also understand why the Bolsheviks didn’t honor the elections, those points are valid, although then opening fire on protestors and escalating to a full purge was still just fully the wrong choice.
Oh, I didn’t mention this, but of course I’m sure the Bolsheviks’ *primary* claim, would have been that the industrial working class was the class whose sentiments really mattered the most (since all other classes, according to Marxist thought, were eventually supposed to be proletarianized anyway), and they did outright win the industrial working class. If you really believe that then it’s not surprising why they would have seen the 1917 election results as a proof of their own legitimacy.
To be clear, I don’t think what the Soviet Union eventually got was the best option on offer- I think that a permanent coalition of Socialist-Revolutionaries and Communists, or maybe just Left SRs and communists, with the left SRs as the senior partner, would have been a lot better. Likewise I think there were a lot of other roads not taken that would have ended up better for the Soviet Union and their allies- if Lenin had lived longer, if Bukharin and the other “right wing” communists had won the power struggle and their program of gradual industrialization and peasant-centered socialism had won the day, if Khrushchev and his reforms had lasted longer, if they’d integrated a greater role for markets into their economy, maybe most importantly of all if they’d just set food prices and agricultural wages higher. But, I think it’s important to think about how and why things turned out the way they did, and to try and understand what people were thinking and why their actions made sense to them, given their premises and worldview.
+1000.
More generally, I think “lack of hierarchy” is completely a non-answer to *any* sort of situation which requires tough decisions with sharp tradeoffs on either side. War and counterrevolution are just particularly obvious examples, but I can’t see how an anarchist society (not that such a thing could ever or will ever exist, but let’s play the game for a minute) could ever decide on any of the other large-scale decisions about wages and prices, competing investment priorities, resource tradeoffs and shortages, ethnic and national conflicts, environmental problems, or any of many other situations that face any complex modern society, capitalist or socialist.
Yes, because the possibility of anarchist society is different at different scales.
A perfect anarchy doesn’t need hierarchies because all tasks are simply entrusted to the member or members most competent to the task, everyone has sufficient leisure time that they do not mind performing the tasks, and all members have sufficient knowledge of each other that tasks are not hoarded by the less competent.
This is how a lot of small friend groups already function, when the aegis of a larger state and the security of family wealth conspire to allow them to; absent those protections groups of humans organized less equitably would likely destroy them in conflict.
Most people have a half-dozen friends they know well enough that they could form a permanent anarchist society with just them in an automated-luxury future. Some people can establish that level of knowledge among a community large enough to run a two-masted sailing ship for a few years. If every person everywhere in the world could perfectly understand every other person everywhere else in the world, global anarchy would be quite viable; until that happens, we instead have to ask ‘what would such a society do when faced with our current problems?’ and ‘how can we convince enough people to do enough of that they circumstances improve at all?’
“In practice we don’t know if this works. Every time it’s been tried the councils get atomized from each other and exterminated by the state.”
Over the last couple of centuries plenty of communes and suchlike have been established in the United States alone without been exterminated by the state. They just haven’t survived very long. That rather suggests that we do know whether it works, and that the answer is not as well as we might like.
But a more subtle answer might be that this system, being a mix of voluntary action, direct democracy and local representatives, sounds very much like a Standard Western Democracy. Any system that works like this embedded within a Standard Western Democracy is going to be embedded in a bigger version of itself, so it’s not surprising they tend to dissolve.
There are a lot of factors that go into why communes aren’t an expression of this, but the simplest is that they don’t own what Marx would term the means of production and what we can term any money at all. Communes fall apart because they can’t support themselves, and they can’t support themselves because they’re not rich or networked in with society.
This is because A. none of the structures of society support them, B. The state implicitly makes things difficult for them with soft power like propaganda, and C. The state *explicitly* just busts them open with force every once in a while, which speaks to their lack of political power. In order for what I’m describing to be met, they’d have to *be the local government*. To my knowledge that’s not happened ever, they’re always subsumed into a larger government.
Of course, another factor is that the kind of person who will join the kind of self-atomized society your talking about is crazy. Socialism is deeply tied into a desire to return to the horizontal social relationships instead of hierarchical ones; how in the world is it an expression of socialism to *separate* from society? In practice, the primary people who want that as misanthropic or cult leaders.
Basically, “without being exterminated by the state” needs to be elaborated on, because from even a casual view it’s completely indefensible as a thesis in the most obvious manner possible, as is the link between isolated commune societies and anything like an actual anarchist society.
Also, Unions are another representation of this form of worker democracy. Not only is/was traditional western society openly hostile to unions in every way that can quantified, ceding ground to them at literal gunpoint, they still exist. This system was strong enough to fight against *literal armies*.
As for western democracy being this-you’re ignoring the role of the state and the capital class in western democracies, which both create power structures which aren’t accountable to the population.
The state, particularly interacting levels of governments, allows for individuals to exert hierarchical authority via laws, militarism, and corruption. This is incredibly telling with how the legal system works, particularly with appeals, where picking your judge is an accepted system for the rich and completely closed to the poor. Combine in the different levels of law code and you’re always guilty of something somewhere, your rights can often be ignored by one level of government through the shadow of another, the state government can get you if the federal government can’t and vice-versa, and both are far to big and removed for you to effectively influence them alone.
Capital ownership allows the use of economic force, backed by the states physical force, to compel behaviors and relationships similar to the “big men” mentioned last week, but without any actual personal relationship. Then there is the interaction of capital and the state, which amounts to corporate power being effectively a tool of the state and powerful capitalists being basically manorial nobles. And, of course, capitalism has no way of redistributing wealth (meritocracy on social scale is a dead trope) and so wealth accumulates in family lines over time, into discrete heritable classes of people.
The interaction of these factors is that western democracies are extremely vulnerable to undemocratic methods of coercion, which is precisely and exactly what led to socialism being developed as a theory to begin with. Classic liberalism overthrew the original system of power and instantly, in decades led to new ones that were only mild improvements. This is all written in…Is it Capital? Maybe it’s one of Marx’s other books, I interact with his writings through online portals…It’s from that period in time. This has been qualified since before the civil war and hasn’t been “fixed” since then. We can even quantify how unequal society is, and America is pretty scuffed.
Israeli kibbutzim seem like they are/were a counterexample? They owned means of production and were integrated into the economy, and in cases where they fell apart, it sounded like part of the problem was being *too* integrated into the economy. That is, people could leave, and even if they couldn’t take any property with them, they’d still have their knowledge and skills.
Israel is also a fortress nation at perennial war with almost everyone around them punctuated by periods of ceasefire, propped up by a military ally that makes literally everyone else look like children playing with sticks. I would hesitate to draw conclusions, not because I can say they’re invalid, but because Israeli society and it’s economy are warped by the geopolitical situation.
That said, I’m not disparaging discussion of how globalization generally and free movement specifically breaks the systems needed for anarchist society, but Israel is such a mess that we really need a different example. I know Vietnamese peasant communes have similar issues, but don’t know enough about them to understand if they’re relevant to this discussion.
“I’m not disparaging discussion of how globalization generally and free movement specifically breaks the systems needed for anarchist society,”
If people being free to leave your system breaks your system, it’s a bad system.
If people being free to leave your system breaks your system, it’s a bad system.
Yea, I fundamentally and vehemently disagree with that, at a level and to a degree it’s almost impossible to overstate. At a variety of levels, both in practice and theory.
“This is what people would choose if given the free choice” is almost never a good guide to what’s good, true, and beautiful, either for the individuals themselves, for their descendants, for society, for nature, or in some objective sense. A great many people would choose to waste their lives on drugs if you gave them the choice- as America is learning right now with its ill-fated experiments with drug legalization- but that doesn’t mean this is in any sense “good”.
More generally, there has been lots of work for decades- by scholars of animal behavior, psychology, economics, anthropology, other disciplines- on how cooperation and altruism evolve, and it’s pretty clear you don’t ever get cooperation to evolve without some kind of coercion and some kind of sanction for individuals who ‘cheat’. Altruism is all about reducing one’s own fitness for the good of the group, and unless it’s reinforced by some kind of penalty for those who violate the norms, altruistic individuals will always get outcompeted by those who want to do less than their share, or take a bigger slice than they’re entitled to.
This also includes cases when the more selfish individuals just want to leave the system, instead of seeking a better place for themselves within it. I think it’s wrong for a person to be raised to adulthood, trained and educated- at social expense- and then to take their accumulated skill and talents and migrate to a country where they can make more money (or for that matter, since we’re talking about “communes”, to a commune where they won’t need to make as many sacrifices, or put in as many hours, or where they can be a little less altruistically minded). I don’t share most of dcmorinmorin’s views, but I think he’s absolutely correct that free movement is deeply damaging to any anticapitalist society or social order. I think the socialist states of the past were right to have emigration restrictions and in their place I would have done the same thing.
Since I mentioned people who study the evolution of cooperation, I can also say I was at a talk on the topic some years ago and I remember an expert in the field raising this in the comments afterwards: that one way systems based on cooperation and altruism can break down is if ‘cheaters’ are free to move, and can settle in a new society where people are unaware of their antisocial reputation and don’t know to apply sanctions or penalties on them. It’s been known for a long time that free movement will break cooperative systems- you can even generalize this outside the animal kingdom, if you want- and i don’t think it’s any accident that the rise of mass migration over the last few decades also coincides with decline of social trust in many societies.
That said, I’m not disparaging discussion of how globalization generally and free movement specifically breaks the systems needed for anarchist society, but Israel is such a mess that we really need a different example.
+1000 to this.
I’m sure part of the problem was also that Israel elected a right wing government in the 1970s that was enthusiastic about capitalism and probably had a dim view of the kibbutzim, although hopefully some Israeli commenters know more about it. I don’t think peasant communes can survive without a strong state protecting them from threats and enemies.
@Hector St. Clare: As a general rule, systems and societies that provide good lives for their people don’t have people trying to leave them. Furthermore, don’t you want cheaters to leave your society?
Frankly, you’ve got this backwards.
@Hector_St_Clare, that’s a very pessimistic view of human nature. Yes we humans have our evolutionary instincts to be selfish and take advantage of others, we also have our intelligence and upbringing which makes us capable of being more than just a Darwinian survival machine.
“A great many people would choose to waste their lives on drugs…” yes they would. Especially in a capitalist system which alienates them from meaningful work. No-one wants to be a poorly paid worker in a Taylorian optimised micromanaged exploitive economy: why is it surprising many people would rather take drugs? Socialism has always placed a value on meaningful work, work that contributes to society as a whole rather than being a means to extract more $.
I’ve also done some amateur reading on the evolutionary aspects of ‘cheaters’ and ‘suckers’. Yes altruists get taken advantage of by cheaters, those who don’t pull their weight. But this isn’t pre-ordained: the likely outcome is for a group with an oversupply of cheaters to collapse and die. Somewhat altruistic groups have better survival characteristics and can tolerate a number of cheaters / freeloaders.
And this doesn’t apply so much to humans, with excellent communication abilities and now modern technologies. If the ‘cheaters’ move to a new community and seem to be slacking off, confirmation that this isn’t new will be just an email. (Facebook message, whatever the kids are using these days.) A bunch of socialist-anarchist communities linked by the Internet can certainly manage the ‘cheater’ problem.
So I’m another person who’s all in favour of free movement. The cheaters can’t do much harm, and you haven’t considered that the altruists also get to move away from the cheaters if they want to.
I mean, lest people forget this, we have historical examples of relatively free movement. There were effectively zero limitations on movement into and out of the united states besides cost during the Ellis Island days. About the only thing that got you turned away was the plague, most estimates show that more than 90% of people entered the country. Actually the figure I commonly find cited is 98%, so mythologizing aside it’s certainly a very high percentage. And people, quite obviously, weren’t clambering to leave. They wanted to come here, rather.
The point I’m making is that people weren’t flowing out of America because it wasn’t coercive, they wanted to be in America because it wasn’t coercive. The freedoms American promised were more than enough to create mass immigration. In a practical sense this only works if you can actually deliver on the promises of freedom behind Anarchism, but if you can’t then we’re back to the society being failed anyway.
And while this won’t necessarily work out for every region, the point of international class consciousness is that the region doesn’t matter; if everyone spontaneously decides to mass emigrate to the Americas and turn the “old” world into a wilderness preserve (and we somehow don’t crash the economy for like fifty reasons) who cares? The people made their choice, they’re presumably happy with it.
“This is what people would choose if given the free choice” is almost never a good guide to what’s good, true, and beautiful, either for the individuals themselves, for their descendants, for society, for nature, or in some objective sense.
What is?
A great many people would choose to waste their lives on drugs if you gave them the choice
And therefore — what? You choose to send them to the gulag?
Furthermore, don’t you want cheaters to leave your society?
This is a decent point, and it’s definitely true that often times governments are *happy* to see people emigrating because the ones leaving are types of people (political dissenters, criminals, ethnic minorities, religious minorities, or, yes, just generally antisocial or selfish people) that for whatever reason they don’t really want to be part of their society.
More generally though, I think the problem here (and I probably contributed to that with my earlier comment as well) is that people aren’t neatly divided into selfish and altruistic types. Many people have tendencies towards both, and which one ends up predominating is going to be influenced by what kind of character traits the society and social environment cultivate and encourage. I think a global environment that provides strong temptations to ditch your society and your social obligations and move to America is a *bad* global environment, one that encourages vice and discourages virtue, rather than the reverse. I don’t think it’s inevitable that someone trained in the medical field at considerable social expense is going to decide to take his skills to America where he can make 5x as much money- I think people respond to social forces and temptations, either positive or negative, and a world which makes this sort of negative and antisocial choice easier is going to be one in which you get more people choosing it.
But why is it antisocial to move to America in this hypothetical? The reason for brain drain isn’t just that wealthy people move here, we keep poor people out. I don’t think it’s a tautology that there’d be antisocial externalities to free movement if there wasn’t open classicism over who got to arrive.
the point of international class consciousness is that the region doesn’t matter; if everyone spontaneously decides to mass emigrate to the Americas and turn the “old” world into a wilderness preserve (and we somehow don’t crash the economy for like fifty reasons) who cares? The people made their choice, they’re presumably happy with it.
Yes, well, I’m not an internationalist or a cosmopolitan, so I very much disagree with ‘who cares’. I’m a nationalist, and I *like* the concept of separate states for separate nations (my ethno-national group doesn’t have a state, for example, but I wish we did).
Besides finding cosmopolitanism deeply unappealing and “icky” as an ideal, I’ve always found the term ‘class consciousness’ to be kind of slippery and weaselly. Of course I’m *conscious* of class, as everyone should be. (That doesn’t mean I have any particular loyalty or liking for *my* class in particular, if anything I’m a bit suspicious of the managerial-professional-intellectual class in general). Of course I also think that a healthy society is one which valorizes and centers the interests of, first and foremost, the working class. This doesn’t mean that’s the *only* thing I care about. I care about a particular political-economic vision (involving state ownership and planning of large sectors of the economy, and worker control of most of the rest), but I care about other things too. I care about my ethnic group, about my direct kin, about my job and work, about my religious and spiritual values, etc.., and if you ask me to choose between my ethno-national loyalties and my political-economic values, I may well not end up on your ‘side’.
@scifihughf:
@Hector_St_Clare, that’s a very pessimistic view of human nature.
I wouldn’t say pessimistic, I’d say balanced. I entirely agree that we aren’t inherently “selfish”: that’s part of the reason I think it’s possible and in the long run, inevitable that we will move past capitalism and establish societies with (some kind of) public or cooperative ownership of the means of production. I think most of us have, in varying proportions, a mixture of selfish and altruistic tendencies and that a healthy society is one which cultivates and encourages the latter to the extent possible, and limits the former to the extent possible (and where selfish inclinations can’t be limited, at least channels them in healthy directions). I think altruism needs to be *cultivated* though, like a fruit or vegetable, it won’t just flourish on its own without care and protection. And for that cultivation I think you need political authority (whether or not you want to call it a state).
Your point about communication networks, the internet etc. is a really good one though and one I hadn’t thought about before, and I think it does help ameliorate at least some of the consequences of free movement. I still think that free movement has a ton of negative consequences, for both the society someone is leaving and the society they’re moving to, but maybe this particular one is no longer a problem.
I do disagree though that “society of cheaters will destroy itself in the end”, because I don’t think there’s any guarantee of that. It’s very easy to get trapped into a negative-sum spiral of mutual distrust, selfishness and self-seeking, and it can be very difficult to escape from that situation even when it would ultimately be better off for everyone, because no one wants to be the one who puts the bell on the cat. This is a military history blog and I think war is actually a good example of that. In a world without the strong norms against aggression that we have had since 1945, and in which war and conquest are considered acceptable, it can be quite difficult to opt out of the game and choose peace, because whoever does so is going to put themselves at a disadvantage and leave themselves vulnerable to less moral competitors. This is part of why I think altruism is so fragile and that without a strong state cultivating it, it’s going to wither.
Saying the state busts up communes is a bit of a weak argument for why communes fail. I would like to live in a society that’s strong enough that I don’t have to worry about being invaded by my neighbours. Anarchism fails to provide that.
“Modern anarcho-socialists seek to mimic the useful aspects of state societies and the useful aspects of nonstate societies by redistributing capital, which can be broadly defined as transferable productive property, through democratic organization.”
Sounds awful. Everyone gets to lay claim to property according to how good they are at politics, thus giving a hierarchy based on social skills, with sociopaths on the high end, and autistics on the low, and all the rest of ranged inbetween.
Also a formula for poverty. If the criterion for riches is talking other people into voting you them, not making them, people will stop making them.
Yeah, capitalism sucks.
Wait, you think your describing socialism?
In all seriousness, not that I’m actually saying anything untrue there, that’s why egalitarian distribution is a core tenet. Socialists don’t want to play games with who gets a share, if you breath you get enough to continue doing so and if you work you get an equal share. That’s what your missing.
Redistributing capital according to perceived worth is one of the practical tenets of fascism; they aren’t against the idea of capitalism, but want “the right” people in charge. This naturally leads to state or nonstate violence to redistribute wealth to the politically favored.
This is one of the ways fascism is a reaction against socialism; take the undeniable tenet that the capitalist system doesn’t transfer wealth according to merit, and that it stifles growth and happiness, then apply the most bigoted lens possible to conclude that this isn’t capitalisms fault. Mix with some fetishization of power and cult of personality to ease the cognitive dissonance.
I am describing socialism. As you described it. Processes can not be both democratic and egalitarian because democracy loves to dump on the unpopular. Also, all they have to do is declare that you aren’t working, or aren’t working enough. Furthermore, they control what is manufactured and how much it costs so even if you get a nominally equal share, anyone with different interests can discover how little nominal equality means.
No, you’re describing capitalism, almost word for word now. Everything your talking about is a factor of capital ownership. Whose they in this discussion? That implies a class of people making decisions about production, which means you’re talking about capitalists.
Also, processes can’t be both egalitarian and democratic? What? They can’t be non-democratic and egalitarian definitionally. Do you think a monarchy is more egalitarian than a democracy? Or is this just an argument about how egalitarianism is impossible?
“No, you’re describing capitalism, almost word for word now. ”
Irrelevant, even if true. I am discussing YOUR description of socialism.
And, of course, false. There are companies that try to run by who gets the most people on his side, and they go bankrupt because the people spend all their time schmoozing and then enter the death cycle as they fire everyone actually doing the work that brings in the money.
“Also, processes can’t be both egalitarian and democratic? What?”
Anyone who has read any history knows that democracies are bitterly un-egalitarian. Which is why, as a sage Founding Father said, they “have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Because the majority has no constraints on its ability to oppress the minority the way, say, a king does.
“Do you think a monarchy is more egalitarian than a democracy? Or is this just an argument about how egalitarianism is impossible?”
Given you are describing something existing solely in theory, the burden of proof is on you to establish the possibility.
That implies a class of people making decisions about production, which means you’re talking about capitalists.
Even if you abolish capitalism, at least *some* decisions about production are going to need to be decided by a central authority (which will mean, by the state). You can’t have *every* decision about economic priorities and tradeoffs be negotiated by the enterprises themselves, at least not in any kind of complex industrial society.
No, Mary, you don’t just get to push all burden of proof on me here. What the actual holy fuck do you believe? Because there’s a completely incoherent set of beliefs here that all contradict now that need to be true for your comments to make sense.
You keep asserting that your describing socialism when you say some crazy shit, then saying my words say that. No they don’t. You’re the one bringing that conclusion here, *explain it*. These are just assertions, and they’re not communicating the assumptions you’re making that render then valid.
Although your assumption that democratic work organizations all fail is actually communicated, so I shouldn’t be too harsh. The issue for you is that no they factually don’t, that’s nonsense. People democratically own or run businesses that succeed all the time. The only thing anyone needs to do to disprove your entire conclusion is to go find one example otherwise.
It’s not clear what this actually relates to, because that has nothing to do with socialism being hierarchical. Or capitalism not being so. It’s actually just an assertion that egalitarianism is bad for the economy.
It does speak to why you actually don’t like my statements, namely that your assuming they don’t make wealth; they’re not *profitable*. But if that’s the sum total of your actual dispute, just say that. You’ll look really dumb to anyone who disagrees with you, because that’s how human beings work, but I look really dumb to people who disagree with me all the time. If you aren’t willing to do that you have to choose not to actually believe anything that can be wrong, which means you don’t believe anything at all.
Also A. Madison was arguing for a conclusion, namely in support of the actual constitutional proposal on the table which needed to pass, B. That statement is factually inaccurate, and C. Madison, and Hamilton, were dangerously and stupidly wrong. They were arguing that the rule of a majority was the biggest danger to Democracies, that there didn’t need to be a bill of rights, and that passing the constitution as was would be sufficient to protect people.
As the numerous erosions of our rights by both supreme court edict and federal laws show the bill of rights was not only necessary, but *insufficient*.
As the rising inequality and oversized influence of special monied interests show the actual threat is oppressive minority rule, which is just manifestly worse for most people than even an oppressive majority rule.
Again, I can’t argue against the idea that majority rule is inherently oppressive until you explain what assumptions make you think it is, but in this debate your position is actually that oppressive minority rule is better, at least as presented so far.
But to the point the federalist papers were, in fact, wrong. Which is obvious on hindsight. I know what Madison believed, and the flaws in his philosophy are why I’m a socialist, not a liberal. Hell, those flaws are why socialism exists. It’s a development on liberalism.
Hector, the coercive elements of the group don’t make a “they”, was my point. The terms being used implied a *class* making those decisions, and even if we acknowledge some need for a coercive consensus it won’t necessarily create a class division. That is the point of keeping it democratic.
Hector, the coercive elements of the group don’t make a “they”, was my point. The terms being used implied a *class* making those decisions, and even if we acknowledge some need for a coercive consensus it won’t necessarily create a class division
Oh ok. Yea, I agree entirely with that.
“You keep asserting that your describing socialism when you say some crazy shit, then saying my words say that.”
You were the one who described it as “redistributing capital, which can be broadly defined as transferable productive property, through democratic organization.”
If you do not recognize it with the euphemisms stripped off, that’s on you. Because you clearly describe it as politically taking people’s property to give it to someone else who’s more politically adept at getting the votes.
“That statement is factually inaccurate, and C. Madison, and Hamilton, were dangerously and stupidly wrong. ”
No, they were right. Consider such things as ostracism, where a democracy had a practice of imposing exile on someone just because a bunch of people decided to think him dangerous.
” The only thing anyone needs to do to disprove your entire conclusion is to go find one example otherwise.”
Nope. You have go prove that they all work. Because no one sane will support your proposal on the grounds that it can conceivably work. We want evidence that at the very least, it’s more likely to succeed than to fail.
One also suspects that those few that do work are selecting who is involved. You can not propose making it society wide without showing it works just well as when including the narcissists and the sociopaths.
“No, Mary, you don’t just get to push all burden of proof on me here. ”
You do realize that in a democratic process, I not only get to decide how to vote, I get to decide how I decide? You do not get to declare “This is true, support this,” without satisfying the burden of proof that pleases me.
@Mary, I believe in persuading people rather than yelling at them so here’s my attempt at justifying this anarcho-socialist system.
It’s not capitalism, but that does not, emphatically not, automatically mean no markets. Markets are a great way to allocate resources and let people express their priorities, without any central government or central planning. What the “socialist” bit says is that pure profit is not the only mechanism. And that some aspects of life (food, shelter, medical care) are not allocated by a market, they are guaranteed for all.
And I believe that in many ways these are improvements on our current capitalist system. No land ownership means no rentier class who make money as middlemen without producing anything themselves. No layer of government above local means no large enterprises buying more favourable treatment for themselves. (Small enterprises can still try to buy local favourable treatment, but that’s easier for individual citizens to notice and do something about.)
No CEOs who earn one hundred times as much as the factory floor workers. No private equity firms that buy and asset strip productive companies to cover the purchase debt. No monopolies to destroy competition. What’s left are effectively owner-operator businesses. Everyone has an equal stake in making it work.
And an anarcho-socialist system with free movement makes it easier to take a risk on new ventures, not harder. You can go anywhere without worrying about whether the price of your house has decreased or something. You can go anywhere and you and your family won’t starve, won’t be sleeping on the street, won’t be dying of easily preventable diseases. Isn’t this pro small business?
You do realize you are defending slavery? Anyone who wants can kick back and do nothing and demand that everyone else labor to feed, clothe, and shelter him whether they like it or not. That’s the Supreme Court’s definition of slavery: that someone must labor against his will for the good of another.
No CEOs who earn one hundred times as much as the factory floor workers. No private equity firms that buy and asset strip productive companies to cover the purchase debt. No monopolies to destroy competition. What’s left are effectively owner-operator businesses. Everyone has an equal stake in making it work.
that’s fine, but without a strong state, how do you ensure things stay that way, and more generally, how do you ensure that people don’t take advantage of the system to unfairly improve their own position within it?
“You do realize you are defending slavery? Anyone who wants can kick back and do nothing and demand that everyone else labor to feed, clothe, and shelter him whether they like it or not. That’s the Supreme Court’s definition of slavery: that someone must labor against his will for the good of another.”
If your definition of slavery is being forced to do good things for another person then every expression of state coercion, even that unquestionably justified by the common good, is also slavery. As are systems of nonstate coercion, like being forced to pay for your land, or food, or whatever.
The fact is that this isn’t a real thing. Freeloaders don’t sink socialism, they sink *capitalism*. Give people a fair share of the profits and they jump at the chance to earn more, to contribute more. Productivity increases when you give people direct wealth transfers. It’s a feeling of hopelessness and isolation that fuel disengagement. Those are rooted in a lack of connection between labor and rewards, and that comes about because workers don’t own their businesses in any sense and have no power to force address of grievances.
“If your definition of slavery is being forced to do good things for another person then every expression of state coercion, even that unquestionably justified by the common good, is also slavery.”
An obvious lie. We shall skip over your unsubtle substitution over “do good things” for “labor,” because the crux is that the very purpose of state coercion is exactly to PREVENT my being forced to being to do good things for another person, and also to prevent other cases where people do evil things to another person.
“As are systems of nonstate coercion, like being forced to pay for your land, or food, or whatever.”
Notice that this is literally defining the LACK of slavery as slavery. If you are forced to come to a meeting of minds with someone who has what you want, and give them something they agree to exchange with you, that is FREEDOM.
“Give people a fair share of the profits and they jump at the chance to earn more, to contribute more.”
Nope. They slack. The Pilgrims, in Plymouth, slacked so hard that half of them died of starvation. And that was in a small group where people could see who was slacking, and where religious unity and principles pushed against it.
As soon as the lands were divvied up so each family got what it itself produced, that stopped.
@Mary, you can’t be serious with this talk of slavery.
“You do realize you are defending slavery? Anyone who wants can kick back and do nothing and demand that everyone else labor to feed, clothe, and shelter him whether they like it or not.”
The anarcho-socialist system I’m describing includes in the core ethos that if people are starving, people are sleeping in the streets, people are dying of preventable diseases, then Something Is Very Wrong and all of us should be working to prevent it. Or you can call it a social contract or enlightened self interest: we all agree to help each other in times of need.
And this is hardly unique to either socialism or anarchism: most Christian or Moslem traditions say the same. The tithe, effectively a 10% tax for use by the Church for (in theory) charitable purposes, was often imposed on medieval Europeans who in many cases would have preferred to keep the money for themselves: apparently this is slavery?
Modern societies, even capitalist, recognise that yes people do have to labor against their will for the good of society – which means for the good of other people. Jury duty and conscription are two examples.
And while anarcho-socialists aren’t much in favour of organised coercion, genuine slackers are unlikely to last long. If you don’t pull your weight, good luck asking for help if your Internet connection breaks. Or your toilet overflows. Or you want to eat at the fancy restaurant. You won’t die, but you’re going to have a very subsistence lifestyle.
@Hector_St_Clare
Yeah, how strong the state needs to be is a very difficult question and I’m not going to pretend I have a real answer. I would suggest that “anarchy” is a Platonic ideal, a perfectly spherical cow. We can strive towards this ideal, but more likely would have to settle for “minarchy” with the smallest possible formal government.
In itself that reveals my political / philosophical preference for small government rather than large. Maybe an all-controlling state would do a better job of preserving the planet and humanity.
This is an abstract debate on a mostly ancient/medieval history blog, so sorry but I’m not going to go into too much depth.
You, scifihughf, are seriously defending slavery
” Or you can call it a social contract or enlightened self interest: we all agree to help each other in times of need.”
Except that you are literally describing self-created problems as “need.” If you can go anywhere without worrying, that means that some people are coerced to doing the worrying about YOU.
“Modern societies, even capitalist, recognise that yes people do have to labor against their will for the good of society – which means for the good of other people. Jury duty and conscription are two examples.”
That is obviously false on the face of it. That is keeping society AS A WHOLE going. It is not taking money from my pocket so that John Doe doesn’t have to worry about it.
“And while anarcho-socialists aren’t much in favour of organised coercion, genuine slackers are unlikely to last long.”
Look at welfare some time. People can live on your bare subsistence for generations on end.
“The anarcho-socialist system I’m describing includes in the core ethos that if people are starving, people are sleeping in the streets, people are dying of preventable diseases, then Something Is Very Wrong and all of us should be working to prevent it. Or you can call it a social contract or enlightened self interest: we all agree to help each other in times of need.”
Incidentally, this is the core of your problem here. Any political system that requires anything that begins with “We all just — ” will fail. We all will not “just” do anything.
Your system is set up for the black market to arise in great force, for instance.
“An obvious lie. We shall skip over your unsubtle substitution over “do good things” for “labor,” because the crux is that the very purpose of state coercion is exactly to PREVENT my being forced to being to do good things for another person, and also to prevent other cases where people do evil things to another person”
No, let’s go back to the reframing of doing good things for people as being labor. If you’re forced to war to prevent a genocide-or rather given the option “go to jail or go to war”, then the state is coercing you to do something that has a tenuous at best connection to your own good.
Yet that precise thing has happened. Your philosophy makes this out to be slavery. I’d like to hear you defend that.
Likewise the state coerces you to pay taxes for kids to drink milk. Is this slavery? Oh, I guess it helps keep economic inequality down, which helps protect you
..but then why is redistributing wealth not also to prevent someone from doing evil things to you?
“Notice that this is literally defining the LACK of slavery as slavery. If you are forced to come to a meeting of minds with someone who has what you want, and give them something they agree to exchange with you, that is FREEDOM.”
Oh, because you deny that there is exploitation of the poor by the rich.
If you grow up poor in a home deeply leveraged to a bank, you either need to get a job or become homeless. If you leave and want to rent a home you need to pay for it. If you want food, even if you know how to forage or farm, you need the right to the land.
In America, either the government or capitalists own these homes and that land. And capitalists own the majority of the land people know how to survive on.This ownership is backed by lethal force and compels you to work to pay for the right to eat and sleep. Public pressure has at least made clean enough air and water free, they weren’t always.
There is no meeting of the minds. You’re compelled by state backed violence to work. This is actual slavery. Your reframing is based on a vision of economic reality that is, favorably, a hundred and fifty years dead.
This is right libertarian nonsense and there’s a reason why it’s laughed out of serious intellectual circles. You’ve had to have heard this before, and fully anticipate you having a canned response ready for why you don’t have to listen, but here’s an attempt to cut through that.
If it wasn’t coerced, if people had a choice to engage with the systems of society, why are so many people still so goddamn poor in this country after literal centuries of this form of “freedom”? Why have they all chosen to put themselves in situations where they’re indebted, hungry, and sick?
Freeloaders don’t sink socialism, they sink *capitalism*
I mean, to be fair, this is at least partially because all the existing socialist states I can think of (and all the historical proto-socialist societies I can think of) had tough laws or at least tough social norms against “social parasitism” and forcibly imposed an affirmative obligation to work on everyone.
Those are rooted in a lack of connection between labor and rewards, and that comes about because workers don’t own their businesses in any sense and have no power to force address of grievances.
I entirely agree with you that a healthy society has a tight connection between labor and reward, and in fact that we can make moral judgments about societies based, among other things, on how well they connect labour to reward. I also agree that in a capitalist society, at least a fully capitalist society like the United States, these things are completely disconnected- income and status reflect capital ownership more than they do anything related to how hard you work- and that this is a big cause of a lot of the moral, social and cultural problems we see. Including, very much, laziness and lack of work ethic (not that capitalism invented these problems, but I think a society that devalues labor is going to see a poorer work ethic, for sure). I just don’t see anarchism, specifically, as any kind of solution. Any solution that involves moving beyond capitalism, to me, is going to require a vast increase in the powers of the state, not a decrease. (Or if you don’t like the term ‘state’, substitute ‘coercive political authority’).
I think worker control and worker self-management is great, for example, but in the last analysis I do think you need a strong state to ensure that worker-owned and worker-managed enterprises don’t overstep their bounds. If you don’t want a highly successful worker-owned enterprise to use their profits to start converting themselves into a *capitalist* enterprise, for example, then you need some kind of coercive authority to tell them, “no, this is what you’re legally allowed to do and this is what you aren’t: you can invest in capital goods all you want, but you can’t hire temporary workers who don’t have an ownership share”. You also need a strong state to tax, regulate, and coordinate the activity of worker owned enterprises (and this is not even to get into the fact that there are some industries that don’t lend themselves well to worker ownership, and some people who aren’t really well suited to be worker-owners either, and that in this case if you don’t want capitalism then state ownership is the only reasonable alternative).
I think we are coming from the same place in our dislike for capitalism, we just have very different views about the role of individual freedom versus state authority.
I think my fundamental disagreement is that I don’t trust the state to act as a collective coercive authority because I see the coercive elements as being too easily misused. It’s far more likely that the state rapidly devolved into a tool of enforcing a hierarchy than worker collectives do….
But worker collectives can absolutely become hierarchies. This is a problem largely ignored in anarchist circles, an idealogical blind spot we’re only recently really engaging with. It’s not like this isn’t engaged with in academia, there’s a concept of noble proletariat or labour aristocracy, but most anarchists don’t like talking about it. Even if workers owned their business, some poor saps still have to work mines so others can work factories. And it’s no mystery that mine work effectively trades years of life for money, even in developed countries. There’s an incentive imbalance.
This effectively lets either a mine union or the factory union, depending on how social power breaks down, coerce the other. And the systems involved here, projected over centuries and with the implied creation of soldiery or police to settle disputes, inevitably creates classes. Ignoring fun and purely theoretical futurist solutions like automated mines.
And this is ignoring the classic example, that of regional imbalances where extractive zones and processing zones develop or are inherited, i.e. the global south versus north or rural versus urban.
But I don’t think it’d be a quick process. I’m questioning my assumptions there though, because a lot of the biases and classism have already been inherited. I can already imagine, as an example, a doctors union using public pressure to get a farming collective to stop using antibiotics or to set aside more cows for insulin production (that’s still done right?). Even if the doctors are right, this might not be in the interest of the farmers. Cue strife where if either side withholds labour coercively, people either starve and die or go without care and die, and where every form of social bias gets triggered between rural, urban, educated, and uneducated, etc.
I’m not saying this is likely or that it can’t be resolved, I can just construct a real clusterfuck of a dispute mentally. I still think there’s decades if not centuries before some serious and enforced worker class hierarchy develops, when the state can switch from benign to death cult in a few years.
In any case I can imagine a role for a type of state to mediate disputes as a practical nod to necessity, but it’d need to be international in scope (or you just accelerate this process via nationalism), and it’d need pretty strict limits that both acknowledge rights and create systems that *effectively* prevent the government from violating them. Hence I’m not a pure anarchist, I guess. Or I could define that as compliant with anarchist views of cooperative governance, but I’m not really interested in semantics.
” If you’re forced to war to prevent a genocide-or rather given the option “go to jail or go to war”, ”
So, since you are substituting this war for the actual proposal to compel those who work to support anyone who decides not to, you DO agree that the actual proposal was unjust slavery?
“why are so many people still so goddamn poor in this country after literal centuries of this form of “freedom”? ”
If you took Augustus Caesar — who ruled over at least a seventh of the world population in his day — and dumped him in a modern homeless shelter, you would be unable to convince him that the people sheltering there were human and not gods.
They can get on a bus that will travel a full day’s march in twenty minutes. They own small devices that let them hold conversations with people at a distance that he simply could not send a message, and show pictures of things happening there. They can view entertainments with marvels beyond belief — and that’s before they get into special effects. They can eat fruit out of season. They have ice on a daily basis in the summer — and without relays of slaves running from mountains to carry it in. Their hot water for bathing does not require an army of slaves and heaps of firewood.
When your charity cases live like gods, your problem is not with the existence of rich people.
Mary, you’re not weaseling out of this by saying more crazy shit. You neither answered my questions nor addressed the points I made, I can tell, I’m not an idiot.
Also, um, no, Augustus wouldn’t think that. Even he would understand that not having a safe place to sleep represents poverty. Sure, he’d think even a struggling American homestead might be well off, but you’re both overselling your point and creating an insanely fucked standard for what’s a societal problem. Fuck, your position implies poverty *cannot exist*.
I half suspect you of intentionally playing into my statement about how people get forced into arguing beliefs they don’t hold.
So again, why do poor people exist? The answer you believe, this time.
In itself that reveals my political / philosophical preference for small government rather than large. Maybe an all-controlling state would do a better job of preserving the planet and humanity
Fair enough, and I agree we’re not going to settle the question here! I lean more towards the “all controlling state” end of the spectrum, but I can’t really prove my point any more than you can prove yours- as you say, in the last analysis, a lot of this does come down to our personal makeup and underlying view of the world. I’m one of those people who definitely fears the consequences of an overly weak state more than a strong one.
But they do have somewhere to sleep: the homeless shelter.
When you are calling people who live like gods “poor” the burden of proof is on YOU. No amount of calling it weaseling will change it.
All the more in that you are proposing things that would, in fact, actually result in a roll-back of that wealth. As is shown by the way that everyone tries to implement your proposal, things get worse.
This effectively lets either a mine union or the factory union, depending on how social power breaks down, coerce the other.
That’s a good example, yes. Another would be, in a premodern context, the ancient conflict between farmers and pastoralists (I’d be interested if any Marxist historians have ever addressed those situations through the lens of class conflict- if not, it seems like a glaring gap). Or in a modern industrialized context, workers in ‘critical’ sectors like transportation, infrastructure and energy: they can have quite a bit of leverage and power over workers in other industries, just because of the role that transportation and energy play in, well, everything else, and they would have that power whether the oil wells were owned by capitalists, by workers themselves, or by the state. And leaving aside everything else, without state intervention, in the long run, some worker collectives are going to do better than others just by happenstance, and if they accumulate capital goods then they could (again, without state intervention to stop them) start hiring temporary workers and start moving closer to a traditional capitalist enterprise.
there was too much matrix algebra in the book for me to really grasp the mathematical reasoning, but this book by John Roemer was pretty good, and he explores issues like this, about how what he calls ‘exploitation’ can evolve even within a context of worker ownership (he doesn’t talk too much about worker self management along the Yugoslavian model, but he does suggest he’s kind of doubtful about it, for these reasons).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_General_Theory_of_Exploitation_and_Class#:~:text=A%20General%20Theory%20of%20Exploitation%20and%20Class%20is%20a%201982,States%20by%20Harvard%20University%20Press.
You’re not stupid enough to believe what you’re arguing, Mary. The burden of proof isn’t on me to establish shared facts, like that being homeless sucks. If you don’t explain your beliefs it becomes safe to conclude they are the most inhumane, horrific version possible.
Besides, if being homeless is fine, kindly hand over everything you own, thank you. Poverty isn’t real, right? How can you condemn anarchism for increasing poverty when you’re claiming people who don’t own or even rent a safe place to sleep are living like gods?
Argue something you believe, coward. What do you have to hide about your worldview that’s so damning?
Hector, I tend to think some of those concerns are addressed by a shared legal code. Even without a national enforcement mechanism people tend to follow laws, and if it’s explicitly illegal to employ workers without them receiving a full profit share (which is where I see the tipping point here) then that might have enough impetus to keep that from happening. At least in a communicative society.
Again, this is a larger presupposition of my worldview, that the social pushback on small exploitative cooperatives would outweigh the profits without a state to unevenly enforce laws, but I can recognize limitations on that.
This notably would only work to address the issue of smaller collectives with comparative advantages. The way in which collectives might rationally collaborate to exploit other collectives is a much thornier issue.
I am also curious as to pastoral versus horticultural societies. I don’t know of any clear writings by Marx or Engels, whom I’ve studied more than other authors, but suspect Muslim authors might actually have something to say here. The discussion of nomadic versus sedentary people’s social order is foundational to Arabic historiography and naturally lends itself to further development by the various socialist movements in that region. I would suggest Chinese historiography, but suspect their nationalism might bias the topics discussed. That might be unkind though.
I’ll look into the book, thanks for the recommendation.
“. The burden of proof isn’t on me to establish shared facts, like that being homeless sucks.”
Once you filter out such bogus statistics as “homeless” who are living with friends and family — the vast majority of homeless are, in fact, street people. They could have homes except that, say, their horrible parents won’t let them into the family home unless they agree to stop doing meth.
A large number are insane, to be sure, but the problem there is our insanely hard requirements to institutionalization. The real irony is that the very people who fought to keep them out of institutions now are indignant that people who can’t live in any home outside an institution can’t live in homes outside institutions.
“And while anarcho-socialists aren’t much in favour of organised coercion, genuine slackers are unlikely to last long. If you don’t pull your weight, good luck asking for help if your Internet connection breaks. Or your toilet overflows. Or you want to eat at the fancy restaurant. You won’t die, but you’re going to have a very subsistence lifestyle.”
I note it would be real hell being disabled in such a community.
Or else there’s the wide-open gate of disability fraud for slackers.
I’m not sure I see why this subject has come up, given that the societies our host has been discussing were certainly not anarchies. They were ruled by councils of the men with the largest retinues.
Does “anarchy” now mean, not a society without government, but a society whose governments justification for governing isn’t written down?
We have three, maybe four prominent examples of anarchist polities in recent times: Makhnovites, the Durruti column or CNT/FAI in general, the Kronstadt Commune and Rojava. If one compares and contrasts them with the situation described here with Gauls vs Romans, things look a bit bleak for someone who hopes for something new.
These modern attempts were/are still all fully militarized organizations led by Big Men. Sure, according to Eric Blair a private could joke around and bum for a cigarette with an anarchist general in a way one cannot imagine in a regular nation-state army, but then how did these fellows end up in those positions? And what happens to logistics when subjected to scarcity? Turns out Big Men tend to hoard that equipment for themselves and their immediate circles, whether chainmail tunics or Vickers 6-Tons.
They are still charisma-driven Big Men polities at the core, and sadly bear no difference vs these Celtic civitas after you peel away the superficial political theory coating.
Did Buenaventura Durruti or the Rojava founders inherit their positions, or acquire it based on property ownership? If not, I’d say that makes them kind of different from Gallic or Germanic lords. I’m not sympathetic to anarchism, but a social order based on charismatic authority is still different than one based on hereditary authority or on money. “Bleak” is also subjective- obviously there were/are a lot of people willing to fight for Durruti, Makhno, Rojava etc., so *they* didn’t find it a bleak vision, even if it seems unappealing to me or to you (maybe for different reasons).
(on a separate note, I find the term ‘Big Man’ to be incredibly grating, and wish we would use more formal, traditional terms like ‘magnate’ or ‘grandee’, though of course those are etymologically direct equivalents. “Big Man” as far as I can tell was invented as a derisive term for African and Pacific Island polities by people who didn’t really understand them and were trying to deride them by making them sound like childish simpletons, and although I get that here it’s being used for Europeans, I don’t think it adds to our understanding, respect or empathy for those societies either).
“but a social order based on charismatic authority is still different than one based on hereditary authority or on money.”
maybe better, maybe worse (hereditary authority has its advantages too, most importantly stability), but certainly *different*.
Was there a reason why the non-state societies tended to be poorer than the states? I can see why a state might scale better and be larger, but it’s not clear to me why they would be better at mining metal out of the ground.
It comes down to agriculture, as usual: Places with less fertile lands need more people working the fields to support non-food-producing people like blacksmiths and miners. The same agricultural surplus that allows larger-scale mining efforts also allows the emergence of a class of people enforcing the state structures. And then you have the self-reinforcing equilibrium effect that Bret talked about before: A more organized and specialised society can produce the technology to make farming more efficient and has the spare people to serve as merchants to distribute it, allowing the agricultural surplus to grow even larger and thus for those structures to reinforce themselves as well with more manpower.
That’s why most of the pristine states emerged in extremely fertile river valleys, because those place produce the agricultural surplus quickest.
And why stated societies almost universally invented cities with walls. You want a wall to protect yourself, but the presence of a gate creates a natural point where one group can decide who enters or leaves, *impelling* the creation of a hierarchy. It’s one concrete example of the self reinforcing systems that create states. Roads, shipbuilding, canals, etc. are also examples of systems that materially benefit the society but which are either going to create hierarchy or are primed to do so.
One other aspect is that a lot of specialist jobs are awful. Ignoring ones that can exist but don’t contribute to overall social production (domestic servants) miners, quarriers, sanitation workers, etc. are vital to state function but incredibly hard to get people to do due to health concerns. Hence slavery.
There are a few issues at hand.
Non-state societies don’t police their periphery and there is a kind of no-man’s land which is not cultivated. There is no banditry but small feuds between different villages which keeps something like 30-40% of total territory under-cultivated.
Communal efforts for raising economic efficiency are rather absent. It will involve several communities which are sovereign and have small budgets anyway. Local improvements are present (city walls, deforestation, drainage, etc) but they can not be scaled up to another community and create large benefits.
A state can make economic investments each time it captures a new area and it can also negotiate peace treaties and economic treaties with other states. This allows it to use its entire territory and also resources from other states.
Good question that I was asking myself, but I suspect the causality is the other way around. It’s not “Why are states richer than non-states?” but “Why do rich polity (or civitas, to use Bretts language) become states while poorer ones don’t?”
The answer to _that_ question, I’d hazard to guess, is that both urbanisation and institutions that go beyond personal-relationships require there to be enough to agricultural surplus produced by the farmers for there to be a significant population of non farmers. And this agricultural surplus *is* wealth.
So it’s not because a civitas is a state that it can mine more metal. It’s that the agricultural surplus that allows it to become a state also allows it to have more miners.
[Off topic, but is there a way to type bold or italics in these comments?]
This is a bit of test post on the bold and italic question, so things may not work, but here goes:
Standard HTML is to put i or b inside angle brackets “” to start, and /i or /b inside angel brackets to stop.
HTML italic
HTML bold
some sites use BBCode, which is the same except it uses regular brackets instead “[” and “]”.
[i]BBCode italic[/i]
[b]BBCode bold[/b]
Angle (or angel) brackets are shift-comma and shift-period on standard QWERTY keyboards.
> shift-period
< shift-comma
Note that shift-comma comes first, so that the i or b is inside a diamond shape, sort of.
thing with emphasis
words to stand out
without the spaces in the brackets.
Or maybe with spaces. 🙂 Didn’t realize it would do that.
emphasis for italic
boldness for bold.
remove the ands and spaces, you are good to go.
Nevere mind, I give up.
Do what the other comment says, but with < replacing [. (and the opposite direction to close.)
The series on farming is extremely enlightening, particularly part 4. It turns out, the causality is “why are states richer?”.
A typical peasants household of ~8 is entirely capable of cultivating ~20 acres of land. They can subsist on only about a quarter of that. So, there is a massive quantity of agricultural surplus, right?
Unfortunately, “by default” what happens is that this “surplus” goes to support an increase in the local population. You get a lot of people who live in villages, and who do agricultural work a significant part of the time. The location (far from resources except land, far from transport i.e. rivers, distributed into villages i.e. small chunks) and that part-time farming makes them unable to efficiently work on other things. Hence poverty.
Various polities manage, to various extents, to pry away some fraction of that 75% agricultural surplus and the potentially-non-farmer population it supports from the villages. When it is stable over time (which it needs to be) it’s usually called taxation, but introducing it rapidly involves ample violence (and maintaining it often does, too). After all, at best this involves telling a lot of people, whose livelihood (in every sense) depends on their place in the “horizontal network” between peasants, that they are going to now live somewhere else, far from all their friends and relatives. Of course they don’t want to go along with this, and stay in the village instead, but in turn that means they will fight (quite literally) to retain “their” share of the food supply in the village. Eventually, it takes until the 19th century to get anything approaching a full “solution” of this issue! (The manufacturing productivity of city-dwellers finally got high enough that they could trade stuff to the farmers in exchange for food. Squint: before that point, the returns to agricultural labor were higher than to “non-farm” labor, hence the part-time-superfluous-peasants’ insistence on staying with the most productive segment of their work mix.)
But a polity — almost always a state — that manages to maintain, stably over decades and centuries, this violent extraction of food and transplantation of population into cities, can do economic magic. People can specialize for different occupations, they can build specialized equipment/infrastructure. If they have the size (or good foreign relations, and/or a sea free enough of pirates) they can also do comparative-advantage trades between their regions/with regions of other states. (These factors also increase agricultural productivity somewhat.) Hence all the riches, including metal.
Incidentally, very roughly three schemata of taxation correspond to this spectrum:
1) Taxation in locally-equipped soldiers (fyrd, “select levy”, theme).
2) Taxation in bulk cereals. (Praise Annona, but how do we turn grain by the megaton per year, a.k.a. raw pop-cap, into military force? In late-Republican Rome, they got some kinks in the flows: über-rich guys who can buy armies from their personal wealth, but no formal institution of ~liturgy to reliably discharge that accumulated energy in state-directed privately-financed campaigns against external enemies.)
3) Taxation in money (because commercialization progressed far enough that the farmers sell the majority of their crop).
Note that some cities were calorie and production positive due to local conditions, almost always a productive fishing harbor. Boats are the magic bullet of industrialization where even low tech societies can A. Invest resources to positive return, B. Redistribute resources at distance and C. Make technological progress, mostly in the form of better boats, fishing techniques, and food preservation.
It’s not mistake that every society that made meaningful progress out of the rat race of preindustrial society was a thalassocracy.
The Chinese did pretty well, but they also did an enormous amount of infrastructure work via large-scale organization. And had the advantage of very dense rice agriculture, which made their farmers more productive.
The Chinese did pretty well, but they also did an enormous amount of infrastructure work via large-scale organization.
Japan did better though (at least in terms of things like nutrition, literacy, etc.) which probably strengthens dcmorin’s point.
Besides rice, China and Japan also had soybeans, which are the most efficient source of protein per land area in the world: I wonder if that might have been equally important as an advantage? Soybeans are a much better source of plant protein than any of the other major legumes, though some minor ones might be higher.
Yes, I’ve already read that series.
But you don’t need a state to extract taxation. The local Big Man can do it, and in many non-state societies did just that. The very fact that Gallic “nobility” had exquisite arms and armour should be sufficient proof that they extracted agricultural surplus from those below them in the socio-economic hierarchy! Hell, even the medieval Church extracted a tithe and that institution falls completely outside the paradigm of state / non-state.
Now are states better at extracting agricultural surplus? Sometimes, but far from always. The latter Ptolemies, for example, were perennially short of resources despite having both the heaviest, most institutionalised state apparatus, as well as the most fertile land in the Mediterranean. Are states better at using that agricultural surplus as capital to invest in creating further agricultural surplus? Again, some states did that, but many seem to have completely failed (the Seleucids for example, or later Imperial Rome).
That’s not to deny that a society which 1) can extract agricultural surplus and 2) can invest that agricultural surplus and 3) is stable for long enough for that investment to pay off, then that society will get richer over time, leading to a positive feedback loop. Although pre industrial revolution, the rate of growth is incredibly slow, orders of magnitude slower than what is considered slow growth today, so the effect of this only really becomes noticeable after many generations. A much faster way for a society to become richer is to take others wealth in the zero-sum (negative-sum, really) game of warfare.
The question is whether only states can satisfy those 3 points above. Perhaps, though I’m not convinced, and the converse (all states satisfied them) is empirically false. What is almost certainly true however is that any non-state society that does achieve those 3, will quickly become a state because achieving a monopoly of legitimate violence is a very good investment, possibly the best one! But it is an investment and one that requires (amongst less tangible things) agricultural surplus to feed a significant non-subsistance-farmer population. So it remains the case that only societies over an initial threshold of wealth can hope to latch onto the growth cycle in the first place.
All that to say, yes, the causality does go both ways, but it is stronger in one direction. A society must</b< be sufficiently wealthy to be a state, and a state might then be able to use that wealth to get even wealthier.
Over all, non-states societies tend to be pushed to the margins by states – on to poorer land (see James Scott on Asian hill-peoples). In the particular case discussed here, it may be that Celtic society was not poorer per se than the Mediterranean, just the wealth was differently distributed. Roman sources rate Gallic metalwork, textiles and agriculture highly (IIRC noting a mechanical reaper, wheeled ploughs and iron plough-shares). Archaeology in Britain shows intensive and well-managed farming, with little land left wild. The mid-Roman Republic developed a large ‘middle class’, a fair-sized slave class and a relatively small upper class. If Gallic societies had fewer slaves and more aristocrats it would have a smaller middle class.
Murder. The most basic tension in human societies is between people who do not want to be murdered and people who do not want to be constrained from murdering. Pre-industrialization, the economic cost to a society of not constraining would-be murderers is immiserating to the whole society; arguably it continues to be so today.
Any society with institutions so weak that it features a class of people who can simply get away with murder as a standard feature of their lives will be notably poorer than a technologically equivalent society where people can simply expect not to be murdered with impunity due to the monopoly on legitimate violence. Even societies where murder remains permitted but limited to some kind of class of legitimate targets gains a huge advantage over lawless societies.
I’m rather skeptical of this being at the core of things, mainly because I don’t think the division between “people who do not want to be murdered” and “people who do not want to be constrained from murdering” is normally as sharp as you imply.
Non-state societies aren’t dominated by a class of red-handed serial killers who act with impunity; they tend very much to have bonds of law and custom restraining violence within most of the population, except for some kind of recognized warfare. Among other things, most people have relatives and friends in the community who will avenge them.
Not serial killers, no; just people for whom the fear of suffering consequences of *any* kind (even mere social stigma) outweighs any fear they have that they might be murdered. That outlook tends to cluster, to this day, among people whom it would in practical terms be quite difficult to murder; healthy, well-resourced, male or otherwise demographically privileged in their society.
In fact there is often a large social distance between people who are fans of unregulated personal violence and actual murderers, although Sparta and some conscription-based modern criminal organizations do require inductees to cross that line. In many countries however, including my own, support for police violence is strongest among people with a history of committing intimate partner violence.
> support for police violence is strongest among people with a history of committing intimate partner violence.
I’m not sure where you’re from, but I thought that America’s FBI statistics showed that the highest rate of domestic violence was found among lesbians?
Estimates of the rate of violence amongst lesbians range from 17% to 73% for studies with nearly identical methodologies, compared to 30-50% of heteronormative couples. It’s even possible to show that lesbians suffer more violence from men than women if you select you questions poorly.
The truth is no one knows. What we do know is that domestic abusers are massively more likely to do just about any crime you can imagine whilst also supporting the police more. Hypocrisy and entitlement are core personality traits.
“What we do know is that domestic abusers are massively more likely to do just about any crime you can imagine whilst also supporting the police more. Hypocrisy and entitlement are core personality traits.”
Or it could be that domestic abusers are more likely to be fans of violence than non-domestic abusers, and depending on how they were raised will either otherwise be criminals and not fans of the cops, or will be stronger supporters of police violence as a mirror of their own tendencies.
America’s FBI statistics showed that the highest rate of domestic violence was found among lesbians?
It is, but since 1) men are on average much physically stronger than women, 2) lesbians tend (on average) to be Democratic and probably less likely to own guns, I would bet that domestic violent among F/F couples is much less likely to end in death or serious injury than M/F ones.
It’s also worth noting that state societies can be dominated by red handed serial killers; they’re called aristocrats. The aristocracy isn’t always murderously violent, but it’s not unknown for violence against the underclass to be formalized and normalized in law.
“The most basic tension in human societies is between people who do not want to be murdered and people who do not want to be constrained from murdering.”
I haven’t seen any polling, but I would bet good money that the great majority of people who do not want to be constrained from murdering also do not want to be murdered.
The barbarian ancient Europeans described above also wanted not to be robbed or killed, that would be why they allied with equals and exchanged loyalty for protection between nonequals. But a system in which you depend on friends and relatives for protection, is a society in which it is dangerous to spend any time away from them, or near strangers. That is not a society in which you can easily get trade and industry started.
You could quite literally discover a gold mine, and be unable to get anyone to move to work it save slaves. Because no one will willingly move, and only slaves can be compelled to.
There’s a vicious cycle. The reasons for one produce the reasons for the other and vice versa.
Do we know what impact battlefield looting played in subsequent armies? ie after one of the various major Roman defeats, are there any comments about notably heavier infantry (with ex-Roman mail, helmets etc) being encountered in the Roman’s next campaign, or is the number of soldiers the Celtiberians or Germani field enough to dilute out any effect/lack of organization to make it count if they’re still mixing light and heavy troops in the line
As a famous example, Hannibal reequips his infantry with arms looted from the defeated Romans and the battle of Lake Trasimene. Certainly not the only example. Not sure what specific long term impact this would have had, but that particularly army turned out to be *quite* effective in the future.
I have wondered about this myself. Admittedly, mostly in the context of the late-Empire Gothic wars, where at times the Goths seem to build up momentum, defeating progressively better and larger Roman armies, and wondered whether the normal Roman technological advantage is being eroded as the Goths re-equip from the Roman dead.
I would fear that one of the issues the non-state barbarians of the BC era might have is the tendency for loot to be redistributed upwards, and the general lack of central organisation meaning that there isn’t the distribution of arms through the ranks in the way that Hannibal accomplishes. Arausio should have given the Cimbri and co the opportunity to distribute heavy armour to thousands, probably tens of thousands, of their infantry, giving them troops who could stand toe-to-toe with legionaries (albeit without the same level of tactical sophistication) but I’m not aware of their having done so or the use of Roman equipment in later battles. That could be an omission of the sources, or just my unfamiliarity with them, and the Romans do avoid battle with them for three years afterwards while they train up a new army, which is plenty of time for equipment to degrade (if not looked after) or get traded away (as a valuable commodity that isn’t seeing use). But it could also be that the aristocrats at Arausio just added five or six mail shirts to their collections after the battle, and the infantry carried on as before.
(I’ve just been struck with the terrible possibility of a warrior’s looting a Roman panoply after Arausio, its getting traded away in Narbo or Massilia for coin, and that equipment finding its way back to Italy, being repaired and put back into circulation in Marius’s army which would come back and kill that same warrior).
Seems interesting that Rome is both:
The state that best approaches the mobilization levels of its non-state Northwestern and Western European neighbors, and
the state that looks most like those societies internally, having evolved relatively recently out of a non-state society that looks similar institutionally
I would be quite wary of making that assertion. Greek society might look “more different” on paper. But if one notes the relative instability of government and the independence of city-states it;s rather tough to say who looks more or less like the Celts. And also, your term “recently” is doing a ridiculous amount of lifting, as Rome had a state-level society about as long as most other competing states in the Med short of Egypt itself.
They adopt the La Téne military kit.
They even speak Latine.
I feel like I’m missing something. The definition of “legitimate violence” isn’t limited to wars with external forces – it also includes private vengeance, as well as the intimidation and killing of political opponents. Which feels like a fairly common occurrence in the Roman republic?
Political violence is common in Rome from the Gracchi brothers (133 BC) until the end of the civil wars a century later. Precisely the period during which the Republic was failing and the fundamental reason why it was replaced by a state where a very different institution held the monopoly on legitimate violence. For the 3+ centuries before there’s an astonishing lack of any sort of political violence at all in Rome, the kind of stability that was simply unseen anywhere else: assassination was the main cause of death for Hellenistic Kings and most Greek poleis had some kind of civil war every generation or.
I forgot to say: in Rome we see things like the secession of the Plebs on (nominally, if we trust the sources) 3 occasions. This is a concrete case of huge political, constitutional even, clash which was resolved without the violence.
Plus the protests to end the Lex Oppia.
Don’t forget that we know about their wars with external forces is that because *Romans* wrote about them, would would not know about or care about petty internal struggles in Gaul.
I don’t follow the connection \ argument being made. How are petty internal struggles in Gaul remaining unrecorded pertinent to the discussion?
“it also includes private vengeance, as well as the intimidation and killing of political opponents. Which feels like a fairly common occurrence in the Roman republic?”
That’s the availability bias from what gets committed to history. Man bites dog is newsworthy, dog bites man is not.
When Cicero accused Cataline of attempted assassination he certainly presented it as unusual behavior that should make everyone hate Cataline. Cicero was clearly quite good at swaying opinions so if he thought the argument had legs, that’s a good indication that even in 63 BCE, well after Sulla and generations after the Gracchi people viewed such actions harshly.
This is why I tend to (internally) reword “A State Maintains A Monopoly On The Legitimate Use Of Force” as “A State Maintains A Monopoly On Legitimizing The Use Of Force”
Plenty of things that are inarguably STATES legitimize categorically Private Use Of Force By And For The Exclusive Immediate Benefit Of Private Individuals.
“Plenty of things that are inarguably STATES legitimize categorically Private Use Of Force By And For The Exclusive Immediate Benefit Of Private Individuals.”
In fact I doubt there has ever been a state that didn’t do so. All modern ones certainly do.
Though it’d be interesting to speculate about examples: was there ever some, I don’t know, ultra-Buddhist kingdom or Jainist statelet that refused to recognise the right of self-defence? (Presumably if there was it didn’t last very long…)
So when did this happen in Rome? As late as the 5th century BCE we have the Fabii waging a private war against… Veii? I think it was Veii. We know from Sweden that the transition can happen as quickly as a hundred years (look up Birger Jarl, the man who arguably made Sweden a state).
Around the siege of Veii (396 BC) is as good a time as any to mark as the fulcrum of an otherwise very progressive transition, if only because that’s when the state starting paying (stipendium) soldiers. Generally, the sources about the early Republic are so poor that saying anything with accuracy is very hard.
Before that, there was already the notion that Big Men had to be elected to a magistracy with imperium to be allowed to command armies. This was not merely a post-facto recognition that someone had his own private army, but an instruction from the state to levy an army for a particular purpose. While it’s easy to imagine this restriction on private warfare being ignored when these Big Men could mobilise their own clan (gens) for small scale warfare, such as raiding neighbours, they couldn’t when the manpower of the whole state was needed. Progressively, however, the power of the social conventions backing these magistracies seems to become so deeply imbedded in Roman custom as to be unbreakable (until Pompey 4 centuries later).
The Gallic sack of Rome (390 BC) seems to have been the final up the backside for the state to take direct control of all military matters, rather than franchising it out to Big Men when the need arose.
A couple of very minor typos:
Celtiberians quip that to surrender their woulds would “be like cutting off their own hands” -> to surrender their arms would
much larger polities in Late Antiquity that they’re really able to challenge thatdominant position -> that dominant
I believe “woulds” was intended to be “swords”.
“The institutions of states can be durably scaled in a way the personal systems of non-state polities generally cannot be.”
When I hit this sentence I suddenly felt like I no longer knew what was being argued here. Previously it was implied that Western Europe (outside of Muslim Spain?) had no states between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and 1600 or so. But I’ve seen estimates for the population of High Medieval France in excess of 10 million, bigger than any of the population figures listed in this post with the exception of the Seleucids, though perhaps the word “generally” is doing a lot of work here.
Medieval Europe absolutely had state societies. Also had a lot of doubtfully so. To take France as an example, before Philippe Augustus the monarchy had symbolic authority but very little actual authority and individual vassals can and would fight it 1-on-1. After him, vassals were a trouble at times, but it was much more of a state. Then there is England, one of the more centralized. While nobility could push back at times, there very much was a central authority that could be quite intrusive at times (for instance right of wardship over underage nobles, drawing and quartering, nationwide taxes). Holy Roman Empire shifts away from being a state, large parts the emperor couldn’t go without an army in later times.
I think part of the answer is the ties at the bottom of the pile are much weaker. The Gallic societies can mobilize near everyone, may not be formal structures, but very intensive. Medieval realms much, much less. Peak for England is Towton in 1461, maybe 3%, very extraordinary and partially because it was a very prosperous time as more or less the bottom of post-plague population. France during the 100 Years War makes the Seleucids look great at mobilization, they peak at around 1/3rd of 1%. Part of the issue with scaling after all is managing personal relationships. But you are doing downward relationship management much less. And the nobility itself is only 0.5-2%. So for a realm the size of England, the nobility is only in the tens of thousands. The high nobility only numbered about 200 plus their families, not all that different from the Senate of these Gallic realms…
The French aren’t worse at mobilization then the Seleucids they are just vastly more selective and facing much less existential dangers. Many or even most of the troops the Seleucids were levying would have been somewhere between useless and outright liabilities if offered to the French.
In the 100 years war, a pikeman who doesn’t own a riding (non battle) horse armored with a jack of plate and a helmet would be the lowest of the low, someone too poor for a Brigandine, maybe a revolting peasant. In the Seleucid army, that would be an elite heavy infantryman in the Sarissa phalanx.
The systems are also designed for different purposes. The French society, such as it exists pre and during the hundred years war which was a time of state consolidation, was designed to extract heavy shock cavalry. The Selucid society was designed to extract a hodgepodge of ethnic units, centered around a core of lighter cavalry and infantry. The French men at arms contingent at Crecy was maybe 8000 strong, Agincourt had nearly 10000, and neither defeat was terminal to France-although they certainly hurt.
That’s about the size of the Selucid cavalry contingents at Magnesia and the other all hands battles, but from a smaller area with fewer people, although they were more tightly packed in France. The French infantry was often about the same in number, accounting for mercenaries, but was at least equal to the Selucid core Phalanx in kit. Part of that would be buying the better mobilization of Switzerland to form a pike core, but the funds to buy their service was also a social trade.
A basic reading of the economic situation is that, assuming both societies are somehow optimal, France told a several ten thousand light infantry to stay home and farm or forge so they could put their cavalry in heavier armor. That’s a real trade off, but given how Selucid infantry performed probably a wise one.
To clarify, the French had as many infantry as their men at arms, which means they were about the same as the Selucid phalanx-the Selucid armies with various Galatians, Cretans, etc. obviously outnumbered the French army three or four to one, summed, but as I said the effectiveness of those men was highly questionable.
The French society, such as it exists pre and during the hundred years war which was a time of state consolidation, was designed to extract heavy shock cavalry. The Selucid society was designed to extract a hodgepodge of ethnic units, centered around a core of lighter cavalry and infantry.
Hasn’t our gracious host Devereaux just finished a series talking about how the core focus of the Seleucid army, as that of other Hellenistic states, was in heavy shock cavalry?
Yup, but their society wasn’t optimized to produce it. They put a lot of other men on the field, particularly a bunch of troops the French would call peasant levies and we can charitably call light infantry.They also had lighter kit, and heavier kit costs something as a society; i would call the companions medium in comparison to medieval men at arms.
While medieval kingdoms are often assumed to be states, I don’t think that’s our host’s view. In part II of this series he said,
“When I present students (and modernists) with this definition, they often balk at the idea that there existed any states prior to 1600 AD or so, but just because medieval Europe was a politically fragmented place with often very weak central governments doesn’t mean that everywhere was.”
Which seems to imply he agrees with his students about medieval Europe? (IIRC he’s also said things on Twitter that back this up but I’m not going to track them down right now.)
OTOH, to your point about mobilization, maybe our host would say that medieval France was not a state, but nor is it an example of non-state institutions “scaling” given the low mobilization rates. I’m not sure, I’m genuinely having some trouble following the line of argument.
Many medieval vassalage based polities would not, at various points, qualify as states. That isn’t to say there were no states in medieval Europe (the Middle Ages is a long time and Europe is a big place). But yeah, Hugh Capet’s 10th century France was not a state.
Once you drill down into the 100 Years War (eg in Jonathan Sumption’s 3 vol history) the rates look very different – a lot of the war was local. The artisans hauling their bench to the top of the wall so that they could get a bit of work done while keeping watch for English armies, the peasants on castle-guard, the forays and small sieges …The King of France had an army in the field and many more small forces – which is why English holdings tended to diminish between royal expeditions. Mid-late medieval states could mobilise a lot of people, but not gather them into large armies (which could not be supported logistically).
I note that in France, there were nobles who had the right of private justice until the Revolution itself. (Some of them held land in Paris where they had the right.)
A pattern you see in failed states–and I would argue that ‘feudal’ Europe is such–is that the state fades from the top. In many cases localities never really lose their state functions, or develop new local or regional governments; this results in much of Europe experiencing many centuries where you had things that operated as states do but were subsidiary to a broader geographical entity that was definitely not a state and did not reliably respect the rules of the localities.
Generally this is just little stuff like walled towns paying a tax to a noble and getting to have different laws inside the walls, but you even see the Kingdom of England doing some state-like things while part of the Angevin empire.
That would be because at the time, the amount of actual control the Kings of France had over anything except the actual Crownlands was very small, and it wasn’t until the Early Modern period when France as an actual unified state emerged.
From Hugh Capet to Philippe Augustus yes. After that not so much. The role of the crown as supreme arbiter and final secular authority was not in question
Firstly, the question you’d need to ask is not about the total population of the area now called France, but the population in the area administered by a single feudal ruler, to compare that to the population of an average Gallic tribe.
And secondly, there were technologies and practises available in Medieval France that allowed for a greater range of communication and urbanization compared to pre-BC Gaul, thus allowing for the personalistic network of a feudal ruler to stretch a larger geographic area and thus for the top-level coalition to encompass more people.
But that’s a difference in degree, not kind: If the top Big Man of the Averni had had the spare time, the inherited road network and the shared language to regularly be in contact with the biggest Big Man of the Allobroges and the Aeudi, all those coalitions would have merged into a bigger one via those Big Men building a hierarchy between themselves.
So the Gauls and Iberians look like the Fremen Mirage? Should be poor, and in the end do lose to Rome, but in the meantime repeatedly manage higher mobilizations than their state opponents? Even Rome?
Does this “non-state neighbour that punched above their weight” also apply to the southeast neighbours of Romans in the mountainous interior of Italy – the Martians and the Samnites?
The thing making them punch above their weight is the fact that they are completely unlike the Fremen. The Fremen are supposed to be rugged and independent, the Gauls and Iberians can be so massively mobalized because of how thoroughly they are dominated by the nobility. And this doesn’t make good soldiers, poorly fed peasants with no armor make very bad soldiers! The segment of their society who are good soldiers are the leisure class nobility.
Although their horizontal bonds helped too, as our host pointed out.
This discussion has actually clarified a point to me; the Fremen have never existed because socially they’re modeled on the warrior aristocrats of a gaul-like society, made somewhat egalitarian, and stripped of everyone else in the subsistance or economic chain. The Fremen are supposed to all be “big men”, without any small men under them; each one may be smaller or bigger socially, but they’re *all* playing the same game of position and relative leadership, based on charisma and strength.
This is obviously impossible in a preindustrial society, although in some scifi future it’s more plausible; the Fremen have electricity and fertilizer, industrial scientific agriculture and horticulture. They aren’t like any real warrior aristocracy because they don’t need a massive underclass, they have technology.
This isn’t to legitimize the prescriptive social aspects often attached to Fremen society, attempting to turn everyone into a bloodthirsty warrior aristocrats fanatic is a crazy project even if it’s somehow physically possible, but rather that among the core flaws of the Fremen mirage is that it ignores the technology of the constructed society.
“This discussion has actually clarified a point to me; the Fremen have never existed because socially they’re modeled on the warrior aristocrats of a gaul-like society, made somewhat egalitarian, and stripped of everyone else in the subsistance or economic chain. The Fremen are supposed to all be “big men”, without any small men under them; each one may be smaller or bigger socially, but they’re *all* playing the same game of position and relative leadership, based on charisma and strength.
This is obviously impossible in a preindustrial society, although in some scifi future it’s more plausible; the Fremen have electricity and fertilizer, industrial scientific agriculture and horticulture. They aren’t like any real warrior aristocracy because they don’t need a massive underclass,”
Yet I hear that there WAS a range of variability in the labour requirements of preindustrial societies.
For example, nomadic herders. A steppe could support only a limited and variable number of animals and people before the animals starved and so did people; but as long as that limit was not reached, it seems that extracting the food from herds did not actually take all the labour it could feed, and putting more labour into herding ran into diminishing returns.
Which meant that the Mongols could mobilize most adult men and leave their herds to women and elders without serious hit on their production. Which also meant they could do without a large underclass.
I think there are antique mentions as to how Alans, originating as steppe herders, were “all noble”.
How do Fremen compare to the relatively egalitarian steppe herders, vs. the Gallians?
Gauls, not “Gallians.” ‘Gaul’ is the Roman name for what is no France, the people were called ‘the Gauls,’ and the generally accepted adjective for a thing pertaining to the Gauls was ‘Gallic.’
To address your question, it is noteworthy that steppe nomads tended to have a higher (though by no means high rate of success at leveraging their unusual mode of subsistence into major advantages in warfare.
It’s quite rare for a story “the barbarians sweep aside a helpless and paralyzed empire whose government is so preoccupied with internal politics and wealthy pageantry that it’s lost the aptitude for warfare” to actually be true. In the cases where it could arguably be seen as being true, such as China during the Late Song dynasty, it’s usually steppe nomads who are doing a lot of the fighting that brings down the empire.
To an extent, the Fremen Mirage takes the success rate of the most dramatically successful of the steppe nomad cultures (such as the Mongols), and then applies it to just any group that is aesthetically ‘poorer’ and ‘purer’ and ‘more egalitarian’ and ‘sterner’ than the stereotyped “civilized” peoples they are opposing.
Technically Gallian is an entirely acceptable adjective too, linguistically. It’s just not used in practice outside of some fringe cases. It’s not like Gallic is the pure version, I think that’s Gallicus, and you can just as easily get Gallian from Gallia as you can Gallic from Gallicus.
Nomads are indeed a better analogy, but the pastoral lifestyle wasn’t scalable, which eventually led to the Mongols integrating local troops until the majority of their military, if not their maneuver elements, weren’t steppe nomads at all. It’s worth noting that the issues with scaling a tribal army as it conquers land were described in excruciating depth by Ibn Khaldun contemporaneously with the actual historical source material for the Fremen mirage. It’s just a different type of rat race.
It really takes industrial agriculture to break out of this rut and that requires specialization only possible through states with advanced economies. Or only probable at any rate. It also requires the scientific method to really take off, which is itself a cultural event that requires a confluence of factors.
It’s worth noting that Herbert was at least somewhat aware of this on retrospect, as his Fremen are unified by an ecologist first. I wouldn’t say it’s a major theme, but to be even slightly believable they had to be an advanced, scientific culture with developed industry. Otherwise there’d be a thousandth as many.
…which is what the Harkonnens, in their arrogance, believe in story.
It really takes industrial agriculture to break out of this rut and that requires specialization only possible through states with advanced economies.
I kind of wonder if the Incas had ever explored or exploited the bird guano deposits in their coastal desert territories. Which I think is as close as you can get to industrial strength fertilizers before, well, modern industry.
Yes, actually, in fact that’s one of the main reasons they had such a large population. The issue was that distribution of these resources required mass distribution of agricultural capital and megaprojects to utilize. The Incans did this with incredibly strict central planning and their own unique record keeping based on a knot based form of proto writing, but this system proved fragile when the double a shocks of disease and Spanish “liberators” overthrew the state.
That, and everyone was still moving things by hand. The scientific method led to railway mass transit, steam automation, industrial fertilizer, and electronics being invented all in the same two centuries because the actual reasons all those things can work were studied and proven. The Incans lacked writing, although they had the incentives to develop it, and hence they weren’t going to be developing scientific methods despite having the surplus to support specialists.
The unavoidable issue for them was that their empire was young; it’s about as old as Genghis Khan, and was speeding up the human development chart until it crashed.
Here’s a paper on the Incans engaging in central planning of fertilizer access and guano conservation. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ibi.12867#:~:text=The%20use%20of%20guano%20as,of%20more%20than%208%20million.
Regarding footnote 3, there were rumors many years ago about people actually using real-world force related to Eve Online. (I suspect this is an urban legend, but it’s fun, so here goes).
Basically, the game has long been dominated by gigantic and extremely expensive ships, called Titans, that were crushingly powerful in major fights. (They’ve been nerfed somewhat, but are still very strong). In the early days of Titans, there were only a handful in the game, and they tended to have a horrendously outsized impact on battles, so players wanted to find ways to destroy the Titans of their enemies.
One solution apparently seized upon was to identify the player controlling it, find them IRL, and send someone out to sabotage their house’s power/telecoms during a major fight. If the ship went uncontrolled, it’d be much easier to kill, so that was the strategy they picked.
I don’t know of any specific case where this actually happened, but it was a pretty well-known rumor at the time.
The only actual news report I recall of someone cutting a home power line was an English-language summary of a Russian news source. At the time that made it seem credible to me.
The unsubstantiated EVE Online thing I can’t get out of my head is the possibility that (at the time of his death) then-34-year-old Sean Smith may have successfully negotiated more international agreements than anyone else in the US Foreign Service.
Why unsubstantiated? It seems pretty obviously true to me. Vile Rat was a big-time diplomat for the Goons, and a swirling morass of gameplay like Eve has a lot more opportunities for agreements than real-world diplomacy. (Smaller agreements, obviously, but still.)
The sizes of the polities you’re describing in this post are about the same as that of Attica or Sparta. But we know the latter two were full-fledged states, which faced their own pressures from bigger polities (like Persia) and didn’t at all go for 100% male mobilization. How come the reaction of the tribal polities to Rome is so different from that of the bigger Greek poleis to Persia and then Macedon? Or are there similarities that I’m not noticing?
I don’t think this is an inevitable development, merely one which the peoples of Western Europe adopted. Perhaps if the Greco-Persian wars had gone on longer mobilization would have risen, but that’s a huge social change that takes time. For another, states have less men to spare, more of those men are skilled labor or needed for the state to function (even the much more powerful states involved in WWII, playing for incredible stakes, clustered around the Roman level although e.g. Germany and the USSR went higher). Additionally, many of the Greek cities were faced with *subjugation* rather than destruction. They would remain as a polity but owe taxes and obedience to a greater empire.
But non-state entities, as far as I am aware, are also very efficient at mobilization (even in the absence of state threats), presumably because of the social ties Brett discusses. Citizens of a state have less guaranteed shame to accrue from not fighting, and often alternate paths to advancement even in militaristic societies.
Note that Germany and Russia in WWII fielded “poor” armies with horse-drawn transport etc. If you have men in the factories making trucks, then they aren’t in the field carrying rifles. Perhaps the Germany chose poorly, although of course you need capital to build the factories to make the trucks. I am currently reading Adam Tooze’s “The Wages of Destruction” (I took a course from him last spring) which discusses these issues.
I think some of this may be mediated by the types of inequality in the social classes? (Probably ultimately deriving from the socio-economic structure of the society.) Hoplite warfare was restricted to people who had much more protective gear than the lower-class Gauls. And slaves weren’t part of it at all. Sparta was famously unwilling to send its hoplite army on long expeditions, because they were afraid of a helot revolt. It doesn’t seem like the Gaulish tribes ever worried about something like that.
And yet, death or capture of a large number of hoplites was a crippling blow, so the Greek structures didn’t seem particularly less fragile than the Gaulish structures. The people involved tended to be better protected, both in terms of armor and in terms of fighting style, so probably fewer of them tended to die in “normal” warfare. But it seems as though the Greek poleis were mobilizing hoplites at the limit of what their system allowed. (I don’t recall much about the navies, though.)
Generally because the pressures they had been responding to prior to the contact with Mediterranean states had developed them into forms that predisposed them to respond to that contact in that way. Possibly, a specific effect of Phoenician contact–much deeper penetration of state-urban manufactured goods into their societies, or Carthaginian mercenary recruitment habits–predisposed them to a universal service solution over an urbanization solution.
I played in a non-EVE MMO that supported inter-guild warfare (and was for part of my career there one of the lowest-level Big Men in the “political structure” that the game supported); this is exactly how guilds mobilized (and the descriptions earlier of how non-state polities decided to go to war are spot-on for how the guild I was the lowest level of Big Man in decided when to go to war and where to go to war).
One thing I’ll note from my experiences is that (the popular notion of) Dunbar’s Number does impact how non-state institutions can scale, because of the personal nature of relationships
EVE coalitions (the largest factions in the part of space where players have the most power) are also organized like this, with member alliances which each hold their own territory but work together politically, and then member corporations of each alliance which may do different things in that territory, or focus on different parts of their alliances territory. Finally at the bottom each corporation has a number of members, sometimes only a dozen sometimes hundreds, many of which live from the same station and work together on the same things during play.
Mobilization for war is not as codified into the game as this alliance structure (coalitions are a player communication only invention, but corps are in game guilds, and alliances are essentially guilds where each member is a corp), but his structure pushes towards a similar structure of Big Men contacting their underlings. Also in the past coalitions have broken up due to personal issues between leadership, and preventing that is as I understand it a big part of coalition leadership play.
I would argue that many of the groups in EVE (the game uses the term ‘alliance’ to mean something specific, which makes it awkward to use as a term) do come close to being states (within the context of the game). Large areas of the game are dominated by two coalitions of such groups.
A call to go to fight will take the form of the lead group in a coalition contacting the other groups and saying ‘there’s going to be a fight over X, be there or be square’. It’s then up to the structure of the individual groups to propagate that to their members. This is typically centralised. The IT infrastructure ensures that the call can go out to every member of the group at once – no need for ‘big men’.
It’s the group that decides (and enforces) policies on who has access to what resources, who it acceptable to fight. It’s the group that organises payment for equipment losses, determines tax and trade policy, and maintains infrastructure. Which all looks very much like a state to me.
It also reminds me a bit of how fights between larger Twitter accounts tend to go (the main difference being that in those cases the “Big Men” have at best loose control over their clients).
I can’t believe I am the first to have suggested this, but surely there is a remarkable parallel with Montrose’s and Claverhouse’s raising of Highland clan armies against the enemies of the Stuarts, and the later rebellions of 1715 and 1745, with the formation described here of poorly-armed Gaulish pre-state clan-based armies, lethally formidable in the first charge only?
I think that to an extent this is a combination of coincidence and survivorship bias. When a poor society gets a reputation in the history books for being surprisingly dangerous against the armies of a rich society, there are usually some common themes in how they get to be that dangerous. And if they’re a primarily agricultural infantry society (not, say, horse nomads), then the recurring theme is usually “they try and charge you and scare you into running away” or one of a few other very specific tactics that can work for the side that lacks heavily equipped shock troops.
The other catch is that the 1600s and 1700s are post-gunpowder and armor is disappearing from the battlefield. The thing that a poorer army is most likely to be lacking is no longer body armor; it’s firearms and artillery.
It’s just that in large part by coincidence, a bunch of guys with spears and swords and billhooks facing an army of well equipped, well drilled musketeers with cannons have about the same “not great but it’s our best shot” tactic as a similar army facing an army of heavily armored shock infantry from 2000 years ago.
Namely, rush them and hope to break up their unit cohesion before their superior ability to stand there and slug it out in their preferred style of combat grinds your army into hamburger.
Intriguingly, it has been claimed that the Napoleonic-era British Army was very keen on, and very successful with, bayonet charges. And unusual in that the second and third charges could be just as determined as the first. Since their kit was essentially identical to that of everyone else, the difference must in that case have been due to soft factors, rather than hard ones.
I gather the French were also pretty keen on cold steel.
The French famously preferred columns which would minimize frontage and try to pierce through formations. This works well without drilling as much, is more aggressive, and is great against poorly trained or motivated units that won’t cohere when separated from command.
It’s suicidal against cannon and any modern firepower, and poor against disciplined troops whom can hold the charge and fire into the flanks. Hence the French had great success using it against the Austrians, Italians, etc., particularly early, and had to use other tactics against more capable armies. Luckily for them Napoleons uncommon genius in organization and march meant their advantages tended to tell even then, until they just collapsed under the strain.
Shock tactics were very effective in the early gunpowder era, until modern rifles came along. As I understand, one of the keys to the Prussian victory over Austria at Koniggratz was that the Austrians utilized their traditional tactics of first artillery to disorganize and demoralize the opposing army, followed by a bayonet charge to drive them from the field. Unfortunately for them, the Prussians were equipped with the new needle guns, which broke up the bayonet charges before the cold steel could take effect.
An example I know of an earlier battle where the tactics of artillery followed by cold steel worked perfectly was Kips Bay, where the Redcoats drove the Patriot militia from the east side of Manhattan, forcing them to retreat to Harlem.
Yes, and for clarity the needle gun was actually better at medium range; the projectile lost a lot of power due to insufficient seals on the models used then. Where its advantages told was broken terrain, where it could be reloaded from prone (btw, the ergonomics of this is part of why lever actions are out of favor) and can fire 2-3 times faster, depending on how accurate your being and if it breaks.
Still, there were a few charges performed after the needle gun was adopted. You know, non suicidal ones. It wasn’t that much of an upgrade over the minie ball muzzleloader, which already made charges incredibly bloody affairs that nonetheless worked.
In terms of what made skirmish tactics mandatory, shrapnel artillery, machine guns, and internal magazines. The needle rifle was only twice as fast as a muzzleloader using minie balls, and 6 rounds a minute was typical. Plus it broke often.
The next generation bolt with a 5 round clip can put 15 rounds on target in a minute with mild drill. At that point a thin line of men can legitimately kill a charging body of men dead before they can reach them in open terrain. Hell, they can stop cavalry dead.
Machine guns and shrapnel/siege artillery make this even easier and more terrifying for everyone involved, letting a single position control a line of approach and turning a massing force or defensive line into mulch from safety.
The remark about smaller, poorer societies being able to (briefly) match the full power of a larger, richer state reminds me of the American Civil War: although poorer and weaker by almost every measure, by committing to an almost self-cannibalizing level of mobilization the Confederacy could maintain a near-peer force in opposition to the Union for about three years (and a doomed declining force for another year). By contrast Shelby Foote described the Union as having fought the war with “one arm tied behind its back”- emerging not only victorious but essentially unharmed by the war other than heavy casualties.
The confederacy at the start of the war was fighting the north with the north’s own weapons thanks to this bastard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_B._Floyd
I can’t seem to find a quote, but I could swear I saw a contemporary analysis by a Union officer saying that the Confederacy was “hollow” (or an “empty shell” or something like that), because although they’d raised an effective army, there was virtually nothing left behind. And once Union armies had penetrated into the interior of the Confederacy, they could roam largely unchecked, and the officer (IIRC, which I may not) was in the process of doing just that.
Attributed to General Sherman by General Hitchcock.
Thanks!
Yeah, I don’t think it is properly appreciated just *how* insanely hard the Confederates mobilized their society. Perhaps because it is so familiar to us. Something in the vicinity of 10% of their population counting slaves. Among just the free white population, a level that rivals the powers of World War I and II. Unlike those though the vast majority were volunteers. This in a society with very weak formal militarization structures. The Confederacy managed to wage a 4-year total war despite being heavily dependent on imports. In the 1860s. Much higher mobilization than states like France or Prussia a few years later who in theory were more set up for this. The Civil War had 20X the peak men under arms of the Mexican-American War. That is more astonishing than anything Lee did. It is one of those things that really happened that could almost be described as ASB…
And they paid for it. By one estimate a quarter of all the white men of military age in the South died during the war.
Paraguay (right around the time of the US Civil War) kept up a ten year war against the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, at the cost of losing an outright majority of their male population (some people have said 80%+ but that estimate was probably not true).
Interestingly, the historian John Knight calculated that Britain mobilised 10-14% of its male population of military age in the Napoleonic Wars – something you would not guess from the literature of the times. Like the US in WWII it did so while expanding its economy rapidly.
Seems to me that a lot of Jane Austen’s characters are referred to by military or naval rank. (And in Vanity Fair, written a few years later but mostly set at the end of the Wars, both of the female leads marry a soldier, and one is widowed at Waterloo.)
I feel the militarization is there, but it’s just not the focus of the novels.
“the historian John Knight calculated that Britain mobilised 10-14% of its male population of military age in the Napoleonic Wars – something you would not guess from the literature of the times.”
Roger Knight, I think? Britain Against Napoleon?
Oops. You are right
It is quite a figure! But if you think about it, it isn’t implausible. The Royal Navy peaked at 114,000 men in 1812. The Army was 230,000 in 1815.
Total population of the UK was just under 20 million in 1815. About a sixth of that should be military-age males (16-49) so that’s 3.3 million. And 10% of that is 330,000.
And don’t forget that there will have been lots of men who served in the navy during the wars who weren’t in it in 1812, and similarly for the army. They might have died, or deserted, or been discharged for one reason or another (age, disability, etc).
On the other hand, a lot of the British army wasn’t British – there was the King’s German Legion and various Hanoverian and other foreign units, and plenty of foreigners serving in British units too.
The Confederacy was running desperately short on manpower in early 1862, well before the major campaigns got underway. Their largest field army, the Army of Northern Virginia under Joe Johnston, probably never exceed 50,000 soldiers. McClellan over in the Army of the Potomac over 100,000. And the Confederacy could only sustained that by partly cannibalizing other fronts. Only conscription and the “voluntary” enlistments that suddenly resulted kept them in the war. Also, it forced all existing soldiers to stay in, at a time when many (maybe even most) wanted out.
I have suggested that support for Secession may have been just *slightly* overstated given that the Confederacy could barely sustain its armies for a year – at a time with almost no major campaigns. The Union held off conscription for another year thereafter as well.
I think Lee had something like 70k+ effectives at Gettysburg a year after he inherited the AoNV from Johnston. Army sizes fluctuated (at Antietam the Confederates were probably outnumbered 2:1), but occasionally the Confederates were able to approach parity. They also moved troops around, like when Longstreet went West to participate in Chickamauga. It was in 1862 that they instituted their conscription act, though I don’t know to what extent that helped to boost their numbers for the coming campaigns. Obviously by ’64 they were running on fumes, which is why Lee (and, earlier, Cleburne) were advocating for using Black soldiers.
>Obviously by ’64 they were running on fumes,
Correction – by the end of ’64. They fielded a respectable force to oppose Grant in the Wilderness campaign.
What you said is true but it doesn’t really relate to my statements either.
In early 1862, they couldn’t get nearly enough recruits and (correctly) anticipated seeing their existed field armies melt from lack of enthusiasm. Johnston’s army had barely increased. They only managed to stay in the fight at all due to massive conscription. The fact that the Confederacy existed as late as 1864 was the result of said conscription. Conscription fueled even some of the late Spring 1862 campaigns.
IIRC, the Confederacy was more heavily mobilised than the Union only if you do not count the slaves as part of the population of the Confederacy.
Politically that is not unreasonable. But economically, slaves can certainly help keep the economy running while the free men are at war.
Put another way, if some part of your population is unable to be mobilised for political reasons, that is not necessarily a problem, if there were other reasons not to mobilise them anyway.
OTOH, I have seen figures that suggest the UK was more heavily mobilised in the Napoleonic Wars than either side of the US Civil War – but the extra combatants were militiamen who took the field only for training exercises and invasion scares. So most of the time they would be in fields, forges and factories.
Re Britain and the Napoleonic Wars – the militia were the feeding base for the regulars, and militia drafts were regularly sent off to active service.
“I have seen figures that suggest the UK was more heavily mobilised in the Napoleonic Wars than either side of the US Civil War – but the extra combatants were militiamen who took the field only for training exercises and invasion scares.”
See above – it’s entirely plausible even if you ignore militia and just look at regular army and navy.
I’d expect that, in general, a big reason why it’s hard to mobilize a large fraction of the population is that their labor is needed for farming. When these non-state peoples mobilized 25% of their total population, how did they avoid starving during the following winter?
I don’t know, but I’d guess that they usually worked on a system of battle where there’d be one big decisive battle, and then the survivors go home for the rest of the year? (Or where the full mobilization was used for a defensive war, in which case presumably it was better than the alternative.) I don’t think they were particularly cut out for resisting the persistence of Roman armies.
Large states seem to be able to field armies year-round, and keep them fighting until their goal is met – Rome, Carthage, the Persians (by whatever name), and Alexander all managed to pull this off. I would expect that less-organized societies wouldn’t be able to do this, with the major exceptions of nomads and migratory peoples.
I suspect your second point is key: the sources Bret references are from the invaders so they would be mobilizing were for defensive actions and going far from home and if they lost it may not have mattered thatthey were gine.
They are close to where they live, so presumably can go back to do farming stuff pretty quickly if needed. Depends on how much time being in an active military actually took up.
“When these non-state peoples mobilized 25% of their total population, how did they avoid starving during the following winter?”
They (and their mediaeval successors) demobilised them in time for harvest. Levied troops only served for a relatively short period – as little as forty days, sometimes. That’s fine for an agricultural society; you need a lot of manpower to sow the crop, then there’s a pause while you wait for it to grow, then you need a lot of manpower to harvest.
Did these systems persist after the Roman conquest? While they didn’t initially have formalized systems of recruitment in the provinces until after Augustus took power, they did end up using locals as auxiliaries. Were this ad hoc units recruited in a similar way (if on a smaller scale) as described here?
The current series was very helpful in my understanding of non-state societies. And I am impressed by the degree they can mobilise their limited economical resdources for war.
But more importantly, congratulations on the book! I am incredibly happy to find that it finally has a name and a date of release. Your popular outreach has been exceptional so far, and your book recommendations are always enlightening (if not always easy to digest) so I am looking forward to reading more of your scholarship.
This trio of articles provides new material for my headcannon that in Dune the Fremen are actually a stable industrialized society and the Galactic Empire are the backwards barbarians.
The empire is supposed to be space feudalism but it looks a lot like the non state societies described here. The monopoly on legitimate violence is conspicuously absent and the nobles can murder for recreation without consequence. The institutions that do exist like the Bene Gesserit and Space Guild but they aren’t governing. Those at the top look secure in their position but the warrior aristocrats looked secure in their wealth as well and could likewise afford exotic stuff their society could not produce.
The Fremen are decentralized but they pass the statehood test. They have legalized dueling but some authority (the reverend mothers?) prevents widescale warfare. They protect their civilians by hiding them from the empire, they dont need protection from other Fremen. Their factories produce higher quality goods then the imperial factories despite a small population and poor natural resources which points to successful education and training systems.
The Fremen can see this difference but the Imperials can’t because the Fremen have hidden their entire civilian population in underground seitch communities. It’s like if the Iberians were seeing the Scipio’s legions but didn’t know about Italy; the Romans would totally look like the Fremen Mirage. They are so austere that their mightiest warriors dont have ornate equipment and march carrying their own packs. They are so fierce that any one of their line infantry is fit to fight against elite cavalryman. They are a society of equals so their regular infantry have chainmail like our nobles. They are so tireless that they can disassemble and rebuild their tiny walled cities every single day.
The thing I wonder about the Fremen is, where do they get their food? Plants almost certainly need to be involved, directly or indirectly. (Can humans live off of bats? How many insects would that require? And what would the insects eat? Arrakis must have specialized insects by now.) But we see only a few references to food, while most of the text is about water. (Coffee service! How they heck do Fremen have enough coffee beans that people carry personal markers for coffee service!)
One of my headcanons is that 80 years pre-Muad’Dib, they were exactly the small bands of scavengers that the Harkonnens thought they were. But under Pardot Kynes they started terraforming in the southern hemisphere, and growing crops, and rapidly increasing their numbers, as well as learning to use advanced technology.
Although the most likely explanation is that melange is a some sort of super-food: if it can power a sandworm, it can power a human. And since outworlders only consume relatively small amounts of melange, they don’t notice the effect.
Regarding the Empire, I think it’s less of a state itself, and more of a delicate political balancing act, composed of multiple smaller states. As with Gauls and swords, you only have a say in the Galactic Empire if you have atomic weapons, and that happens at the level of Great Houses. And even Houses can’t destroy each other freely, there are rules (“kanly”) for vendettas, including formal rules about traitors(!), and apparently so many types of poisons that they only bother to classify them by the method of administration (although with the rise of melange, poison may have become less useful as a tool, yet another way in which it destabilized the Imperium).
I don’t think the Fremen were a single state before Pardot Kynes arrived, and there’s still vestiges of that old world. Stilgar doesn’t trust Fremen from other sietches to keep Paul and Jessica’s presence secret, although it seems more like reflex than like something with a reason. And there are the stories of Jacurutu, and how other sietches had to cooperate to put them down. Pardot Kynes seems to have operated as a pre-messianic figure, sort of a “John the Baptist”, unifying all the Fremen with a shared dream of paradise, making prophecies with the measurable replicability of science, and transforming their society on a global basis. But even then, the place at the top was occupied by Pardot, then Liet, then Paul-Maud’Dib, and finally Leto II, using personal characteristics to motivate cooperation. The Fremen stopped being reliably loyal under Alia’s regency, because they didn’t trust her, because she didn’t perform their equivalent of “kingship” well enough. (The scene in “Children of Dune” when she and her mother hold audience together is a fascinating peek at how this comes apart.)
The empire very much was a delicate political balancing act. The emperor was powerful enough he could easily crush any individual great house, but could be crush by their combined might.
There was infighting amongst the houses with differing factions, but he’d have make sure none them became to powerful to threatened. Hence why he conspired against the Atreides, their forces were approaching the skill of his Sardukaur and thus a threat to his power.
For food: I just assumed greenhouses or similar, with very good water recycling. If water is the limit to their society, they will have lots of soil, energy, space, etc. to supply all the other needs for crops and maybe a small amount of livestock.
Or they just import food paid for with their super valuable magic spice. It’s a good way to import water too.
They don’t until Paul relocated the Imperial capital. Him doing so sped up the process by centuries, precisely because they started importing water.
They fix the ground with native plants to create soil then grow food crops of terraced plantations in the South. The water for this is from the air, although there’s ample groundwater too; Arrakis used to be green, and the fact it’s not Venus means that it didn’t go into the atmosphere. Water is an incredible greenhouse gas, and if you vaporized the oceans the heat would *literally melt the surface*. That’s what happened to Venus.
That’s actually not headcanon. Oh, sure, there was some agriculture pre Kynes, but he developed the system of soil fixing that created the massive southern plantations as well as the systems which trapped the humidity in air, rock, and sandtrout. This all happened in the last hundred years in universe. Prior to that the Fremen were fewer in number, but still an industrial society, and weren’t unified (although I think it’s suggested Stilgar might’ve been a major leader of he survived the Harkonnens).
It’s worth noting that every major Fremen leader until Alia was a descendant of Kynes or married to one. He’s arguably one of the most important figures in the Dune universe; the Fremen being an army fucked a dozen different plots all at once and let Paul plot his way to the narrow path.
“Although the most likely explanation is that melange is a some sort of super-food: if it can power a sandworm, it can power a human”
The ecology of Dune is very much not a load-bearing structure, but I *think* that worms produce spice, they don’t consume it. Sandworms eat sand plankton (and excrete oxygen). Spice is produced from the excretions of sandtrout, which are juvenile sandworms.
As I recall it:
As you say, there are sand plankton at the bottom of the food pyramid.
Arrakis has a great deal of water, but it is encapsulated deep underground by sandtrout, larval sandworms.
Sometimes a sandtrout reservoir ruptures and dumps water into an underground “pre-spice mass.”
(Sorry, not sure where the pre-spice mass comes from.)
The energetic reaction of water and the PS mass causes an explosive overturn bringing to wet PS mass to the surface, where it turns into spice somehow. I think sunlight and possibly passing through sandworm guts are involved.
Sandworms are attracted to spice sands as territory.
At some points sandworms produce sandtrout or sandtrout eggs, and a very few sandtrout will eventually grow into sandworms.
So the ecological transformation does not require importing bulk water to Arrakis, it just requires keeping it from getting sequestered by sandtrout.
On the flip side in the later books, turning another planet into a spice source could be done by importing a few sandworms into a desert dry enough that they can survive long enough to produce enough sandtrout to get the sequestration cycle started.
@AiryW, the nobles in the Dune Imperium are the state. They do have a monopoly on violence, in this case against the people underneath them. Any noble house can murder their own subjects for recreation, and the power structure is such that the subjects can’t retaliate. But if a noble house murders the subjects of another noble house, that becomes a state vs state style conflict.
Warfare between noble houses as states is regulated according to the Great Conventions and/or fear of the Emperor’s Sardaukar and/or the transportation monopoly held by the Spacing Guild. Again, a monopoly on methods and participants imposed by the large scale structure of the Imperium.
Violence on our planet is regulated under the Geneva conventions. Like the great convention in Dune, states are free to interpret it as they will and so it absolutely does not qualify as a supreme authority.
The emperor is a hegemon like the US is a hegemon. That no more makes the empire a state then it makes the earth a state.
The “Iberians seeing Scipio’s legion” comparison made something click – if you look at a lot of the historical cultures that are considered to be “badass” by popular culture, that list is full of peoples whose subsistence methods were hidden (or “hidden”, if we count cases like Sparta) from the people writing about them (especially since, in many cases, those cultures didn’t have writing themselves).
“iron is a cheap, whereas bronze was expensive. The shift to iron weapons thus enabled putting swords and spears (and not much else!) in the hands of more men.”
One notes that effect is so dramatic that you have Aristotle commenting on how it changed armies.
Which is especially appropriate, because it strikes me that the process of heightened military participation among the La Tènes is in many ways startlingly similar to that of the Ancient Greeks.
There you had small armies of very heavily armoured elites, most of the way up until the serious involvement of a big player in the form of the Achaemenids; subsequent to the Persian Wars (and probably throughout them) we see a rapid expansion of military participation far down the rungs of society, to the point that in the Classical period many hoplites seem to have gone to battle with no metallic armour aside from a simple bronze cap, and not necessarily much effective textile defence either.
That looks pretty similar to our Gallic or Celtiberian “heavy” infantrymen.
Especially when considering that Greek aristocratic cavalry seem to have followed just as enormous a disparity in equipment as their equivalents.
Xenophon recommends (as armour for the cavalryman) a heavy breastplate, Boeotian helmet, bevor-like neck guard, and articulated limb guards, all of metal, plus pteruges of undefined material, leather boots, and protection for the weapon-arm armpit (optionally metal!), while his horse should possess head, chest, and thigh armour which also covers the horseman’s thighs — even should this be the most wishful of shopping lists, the fact that it could be presented with even the slightest sliver of credulity is indicative. Arguably, so is the seeming disuse of shields amongst Hellenic cavalry.
Can you share the exact passage from Aristotle with us? He wrote a lot and trying to find it by searching catalogues isn’t working for me
I am struck by the oddity of grave goods. It’s economically insane to put expensive (in manufacturing labor and raw materials) items in a grave only to have the living go to all the effort of replacing them. Especially things like weapons when the bulk of your army is perpetually under-equipped. And yet, burying high-status individuals with the finest things your society can make is so common as to be almost a human universal.
Another way of looking at this is that we must be continually conscious of the possibility that many people *didn’t* toss their most valuable possessions in a hole on their way out — which is especially relevant when, for instance, you get big disparities in the popularity of metallic body armour between textual and archeological sources.
It’s conspicuous consumption, a very old method by which humans compete for status. You show that your wealthy and powerful specifically by “wasting” arms and armour in a hole where your father now is. This is so powerful because it’s an honest signal: you really have to be wealthy to do this (compared to, say, having a fancy title or songs sung about you which could be faked cheaply).
This is indeed wasteful for that society as a whole, but the person doing this cares more about his immediate status within that society than the generations-long consequences for the martial process of that society.
Well, it’s certainly also a matter of natural philosophy in many cases; elaborate burials were quite often the initiative of the bury-ee, not the burier, in which case no material status could really be enjoyed by them. In such cases you have to look also to the many and varied afterlife beliefs in which such burials were a pragmatic and effective way of taking your belongings along with you to an environment where you could ostensibly still make use of them.
Sure, but we have to separate “how beliefs led to people acting the way they did?” with “how did people’s action result in societies that survived a significant amount of time?”, and I was only addressing the former because that’s the perspective that Kiwianna’s questions took.
Evaluating ancient cultures by our view of economics is really asking “Does this ancient culture fit with my culture?” The answer is, obviously, no. The reason isn’t that they were insane–it’s that they used a different definition of sanity. That’s really how one differentiates cultures. It’s like the question “How do you see clear objects?” The answer to that is “Index of Refraction”. Well, how do you tell different cultures apart? Fundamentally, it’s differences in how they think people should live their lives (artifacts and language and the like are downstream of this).
I would go further. Our view of economics is unique to our culture. Partially we HAVE a view of economics, by which I mean we think of economics as a thing, a field of study; I haven’t seen much evidence that they had that in the past. Partially our views of economics border on veneration; we hold ROI at the same level ancient people held divine obligations. It obviously makes sense to do so, but it’s just as obvious that other cultures won’t. Whether that’s good or not….well, we have epidemics of loneliness, obesity, burnout, stress-related illnesses, and the like, but we also have the highest standard of living of any culture ever. So really that’s a call you have to make for yourself.
“Wow, a series that actually finished with the originally planned number of parts. It can be done!”
Are we sure? What if there’s an addendum next week?
If there isn’t we may need to ask “Who are you, and what have you done with Dr. Devereaux?”
I realize that this is only tangentially related to the topic at hand, but do you have any reading recommendations for learning about druids?
Sorry, this was meant to be a standalone comment.
Now i wonder if (when) modern states like Mexico can collapse into their cartels (without some nuclear apocalypse). I heard that Italy raised levy from their mafia in WW2 so I guess it took some external war to push failing state into a non state. Also some Middle East and African states doesn’t sound like a state even though it’s recognized by UN.
The reference to how these societies might communicate internally for their muster is making me feel like digging up and getting back into my copy of “The Ancient Paths” by Graham Robb.
Although of a mind to look into any supplementary commentary on it, since I observe now that Robb is apparently not trained as a historian or archaeologist. Still, I recall some compelling ideas presented of non-state communications.
The reference to armies that are all teeth and no tail is a little funny to me, since it seems to me as though there’s a recurring element of key Roman victories being disastrous against these kinds of armies when, once put to rout, they become unable to effectively flee because their own camps form a hard barrier to their path of retreat. It always seemed to me that when you make most of your society your army, there’s a stronger incentive than ever for them to carry all of their stuff behind them.
I realize that this is only tangentially related to the topic at hand, but do you have any reading recommendations for learning about druids?
I know this isn’t addressed at me, but Barry Clunliffe’s The Celts (2018 for the updated edition) is pretty much the state-of-the-art of knowledge on all things Celts, at least, at a level accessible to the keen amateur who doesn’t want to go into research papers. The word “Druid” comes up 60+ times in my copy of the ebook, is indexed a dozen times, and there’s a whole chapter on “Religious Systems” in general. This is probably a good place to start, and you can then follow the citation chain to more specialised texts if you want to dig deeper.
Prepare to be disappointed by how little is known, and how shaky even that little bit of knowledge is.
Thanks for the recommendation.
And yeah, pretty much everything I’d read about them previously amounted to “we know very little about them”, so I won’t get my hopes up.
Just here to voice my appreciation of the Virgil reference in your book project title.
Plus Burns and Steinbeck.
The parallels to the Indigenous tribal societies of North America keep piling up. Not only are war parties organized by “Big Men” relying on vertical and horizontal relationships (in this case villages), but they were faced by a much larger, more centrally organized and wealthier state level opponent (Americans), they were able to be competitive in the field by mobilizing a very large number of their warrior age men (effectively all of them), were able to stay in the field a very short period of time, were unable to continue resistance in the immediate aftermath of a major defeat, had difficulty controlling gangs of young toughs who would frequently go out and tangle with the Whites without permission, the decision to to go war was made by councils of elders and chiefs, who mustered the warriors by assembling them in one place, and choosing a war leader for the upcoming battle (usually, but not always a chief).
I’m basing this on the Eastern Woodlands tribes like the Iroquois, the Cherokees and Shawnee. I know less about the Plains peoples, but what little I have read and heard about them seems consistent.
The main differences appear to be twofold: they didn’t adopt the “charge and hope for the best” strategy, preferring instead to conduct large scale ambushes and hit and run tactics.
The other major difference is the lack of a large wealth disparity.
“were unable to continue resistance in the immediate aftermath of a major defeat”
Or after a victory more often then not.
Excellent series.
I’ve always been skeptical of the definition of a state as that which has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, viewing it similarly to how I view glib ‘modernisms’ such as “falsifiability is the essence of science” or “knowledge is justified true belief”, but Prof. Devereaux has gone a long way toward convincing me.
However, I wonder if the monopoly on force is a symptom rather than the real essence. It seems to me that the deeper reality would be the state as that which is recognized as the ultimate arbiter and dispenser of justice (this is what legitimizes force after all), and the accompanying need to enforce its conception of justice entails the concomitant monopoly on the legitimate use of force.
I remember that when Jared Diamond (I think) is talking about the evolution of states in one of his books, he points specifically to an ethnic group in South Sudan that had a well-defined set of judges that would render verdicts in disputes between individuals or clans. These judges and courts had only customary authority, they didn’t really have any reservoir of armed force they could invoke to make their judgments binding and they relied on deference to custom to make their rulings stick, which is why Diamond considers this society a proto-state rather than a state, but it is interesting that he talks specifically about the administration of justice as a big step forward in the evolution of this society towards statehood.
I think it’s pretty common in situations of civil war as well, where an insurgent army is trying to establish themselves as the new “state”, that they put a big emphasis on setting up courts and dispensing justice as a step towards establishing their legitimacy.
This seems right to me. The archaeology strongly suggests that the earliest states coalesced around religious sites, whose functions included arbitration – and condemnation usually has a religious element: it draws a line between society and the condemned.
I really appreciated in the discussion of Roman legions vs. Hellenistic armies the “theory of victory” that those two groups had. How did that work for these armies?
How did they organize themselves internally? The retinue-of-retinues model strikes me as bringing a bunch of sort of vertically-integrated (i.e, from several different levels of social class) groups of people together to form an army. But when we talk about the actual battle, the units seem to be more horizontally-integrated, with the aristocratic men being on horseback in one group, and the poorer folks on foot being in one (or several) groups together. I might be projecting some Total-War-esque ideas of structure on to what was maybe more mob-like in practice, but it seems to me that these armies would have more organization than just a big blob of dudes, but I’m not sure how that would have been achieved.
If they did group themselves in to some semblance of a formation, how did they know what to do and what roles each person had? I would guess that they trained however possible while not in an army and that the style of combat was essentially traditional. That would make sense given the lack of central organization to create a doctrine, like the Romans and Hellenistic armies had.
I think the answer to that is found in the Uruk-Hai vs Helm’s Deep series, when Bret said how it was incongruous to portray the Isengard army having units of varying sizes.
So in the non-state army, the units accumulate around the social bonds of the areas from which those particular levies were drawn, cohesion lent by being peacetime neighbours. They won’t be led by aristocrats, but people of closer social status who still have high local prominence; sometimes actually appointed by aristocrats, sometimes chosen by the unit as a whole (similar to how Republican centurions were elected). These will at least be able to push the unit forward and help rally them when they start drifting up.
Lacking drill, their capabilities will be simplistic. They might be able to perform some combined arms operation depending on how members of the coalition have environmentally specialized (like how the Romans got slingers particularly from the Balaeric islands), but the order of actions can’t really be sophisticated to do things like filling gaps in a pivoting formation or capitalising on opportune vulnerabilities, so it’s just the basic model of “general assembles line of troops putting strong units where they’re expected to be opposite weak ones, and sends the line forward hoping it pays off in the clash”. Their might be a few layers of lines to go one at a time, but without the arrangement the Romans had that made it easier to retreat through them.
I realise that this is a few weeks old now but I’m wondering how the logistics of these societies worked to let them field such large armies when similar mobilisations and agricultural structures led to very small armies, at least by comparison, in te european middle ages. Obviously there is the difference in focus in terms of military “spending” between smaller aristocratic armies and bigger mass mobilisations but even when calling large levies middle ages vassalage networks don’t seem to be able to keep the same number of men in the field.