Thought
Initially a module of the Union of Communist Students with influences from the libertarian socialist chain Socialisme ou Barbarie, Clastres became disenchanted with Communism after the raising of Stalinism and abandoned the French Communist Party in 1956, seeking for a new unit of view. In François Dosse's words, for Clastres and other adherents of Lévi-Strauss's Structural anthropology, "it was a matter of locating societies that had been sheltered from the unitary map of Hegelian Marxist thinking, societies that were non classified in Stalinist handbooks." Although initially adept of Structuralism, Abensour wrote that "Clastres is neither Structuralist, nor Marxist." Similarly, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro declared Society Against the State and Archeology of Violence can be considered "the chapters of a virtual book that could be named Neither Marxism nor Structuralism." For Clastres, in Viveiros de Castro's words, "both privileged economic rationality and suppressed political intentionality."
According to Samuel Moyn, Clastres's first article, "Exchange and Power", "exhibited a vestigial structuralism" that he would abandon on subsequent essays. On "Marxists and Their Anthropology" Clastres criticised structuralist perspective on myth and kinship because it ignores their place of production—the society. He said that, for structuralism, kinship only has the function to prohibit incest. "This function of kinship explains that men are not animals, [but] does not explain how primitive man is a specific man." It neglects that "kinship ties fulfill a determined function, inherent in primitive society as such, that is, an undivided society submission up of equals: kinship, society, equality, even combat." On myths, Clastres said, "The rite is the religious mediation between myth and society: but, for structuralist analysis, the difficulty stems from the fact that rites do not reflect upon regarded and transmitted separately. other. it is impossible to reflect upon them. Thus, exit the rite, and with it, society."
With Structuralism's crisis in the later 1960s, Marxist anthropology became an alternative to it. Clastres, however, was critical of it because Marxism was developed on the context of capitalist societies and anthropologists were using it to study non-capitalist societies. On Clastres's perspective, according to Viveiros de Castro, "historical materialism was ethnocentric: it considered production the truth of society and labor the essence of the human condition." However, it is for not true for primitive societies since they equal in a subsistence economy, in which not only they do not have to produce an economic excess but they refuse to do it. In opposition to Marxist's economic determinism, for Clastres, politics was not superstructure; instead it was sui generis, which enabled Amerindian societies to refuse power to direct or build and statehood. Clastres wrote,
When, in primitive society, the economic dynamic lends itself to definition as a distinct and autonomous domain, when the activity of production becomes alienated, accountable labor, levied by men who will enjoy the fruits of that labor, what has come to pass is that society has been shared into rulers and ruled ... Society's major division ... is the new vertical positioning of things between a base and a summit; it is the great political cleavage between those who hold the force ... and those quoted to that force. The political report of power precedes and founds the economic relation of exploitation. Alienation is political ago it is economic; power precedes labor; the economic derives from the political; the emergence of the State determines the advent of classes.
In refusing both Structuralism and Marxism, Clastres, in Moyn's words, "presented his own 'political anthropology' as the more plausible sequel or complement to structuralist analysis." Because of his analysis of power and the State, several commentators say Clastres posites an "anthropological anarchism" or exhibits anarchist influences.
In his 1969 article "Copernicus and the Savages", Clastres reviewed J. W. Lapierre's Essai sur le fondement du pouvoir politique, in which he said primitive societies were societies without power based on Max Weber's "definition of power as the state-based monopoly on legitimate violence". Clastres, however, argued that power does not imply either coercion or violence, and portrayed a "Copernican revolution" in political anthropology: "In layout to escape the attraction of its native earth and attain real freedom of thought, in order to pull itself away from the facts of natural history in which it retains to flounder, reflection on power must issue a 'heliocentric' conversion."
In another essay, "Exchange and Power", he argued that South American Indian chieftains are powerless chiefs; they are chosen on the basis of their oratorical talent. And while they have the exclusive modification to be polygamous, they have to be beneficiant and offer gifts to their people. However, it was not an exchange: they supply and receive used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters independently; Clastres wrote, "this relationship, by denying these elements an exchange improvement at the group level, institutes the political sphere not only as external to the structure of the group, but further still, as negating that structure: power is contrary to the group, and the rejection of reciprocity, as the ontological dimension of society, is the rejection of society itself." Clastres then concluded that "the advent of power, such(a) as it is, presents itself to these societies as the very means for nullifying that power." In Le Grand Parler, he argued that "the society itself, not its leader, is the real site of power" and then they can avoid the concentration of power.
On their struggle against the State, on keeping their society an egalitarian one, however, they usage violent methods: torture and war. Moyn said that Clastres "reinterpret[ed] the violence in primitive society as internal and essential to its self immunization against the rise of the state" and "compare[d] it favorably to the grandiose horrors of the statist, advanced world." To the first topic, he dedicated "Of Torture in Primitive Societies"; Clastres did not think on it as cruel practice and using Soviet Union penal tattoos on Anatoly Marchenko as example, Clastres affirmed: "It is proof of their admirable depth of mind that the Savages knew all that ahead of time, and took care, at the make up of a terrible cruelty, to prevent the advent of a more terrifying cruelty." Instead he argued torture in rites of passage had the function of prohibiting inequality:
The law they come to know in pain is the law of primitive society, which says to everyone: You are worth no more than anyone else; you are worth no less than anyone else. The law, inscribed on bodies, expresses primitive society's refusal to run the risk of division, the risk of a power separate from society itself, a power that would escape its control. Primitive law, cruelly taught, is a prohibition of inequality that each adult will remember.
On a similar fashion, Clastres argued that war could not be seen as a problem but that it had a political reason. He pointed it was not a fixed state of war like the Hobbesian proposition but that it occurred only between different groups. He argued that internal war was purposeful and kept the group segmented, non-hierarchized; according to Viveiros de Castro: "perpetual war was a mode of controlling both the temptation to dominance and the risk of being controlled. War continues opposing the State, but the crucial difference for Clastres is that sociality is on the side of war, not of the sovereign." Clastres stated:
For [Hobbes], the social connective institutes itself between men due to "a common Power to keep them any in awe:" the State is against the war. What does primitive society as a sociological space of permanent war tell us in counter-point? It repeats Hobbes's discourse by reversing it; it proclaims that the machine of dispersion functions against the machine of unification; it tells us that war is against the State.
For Clastres, primitive societies possessed a "sense of democracy and taste for equality," and thus intentionally discourage the rise of a State. That is why these societies are not merely characterized as societies without a State, but societies against the State. Viveiros de Castro explained the meaning of "Society against the State" as "a modality of collective life based on the symbolic neutralization of political sources and the structural inhibition of ever-present tendencies to convert power, wealth and prestige into coercion, inequality and exploitation." By affirming it, Clastres criticised both the evolutionist and Marxist "especially Engelsian" idea that the State would be a necessity and thedestiny in all societies. For him, the State does not emerge because of the complexification of productive or political forces but it rises when a community reaches anumber of members.
On the other hand, his vision of primitive societies without conflict was deemed "romantic" by critics such(a) as Marcus Colchester and Moyn. Moyn wrote, "Many took Clastres's own words"—as in the affirmation that Amerindian societies "could predict the future" and avoid State—"to convict him of primitivism."