State = Kleptocracy

Jared Diamond wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel over a decade ago. The book charted a new way to look at history, one based on science and data (Diamond’s book won a 1998 science prize in addition to his nonfiction Pulitzer). Diamond specifically advocates treating history as a science.

Yet what I appreciated most in Diamond’s book is Chapter 14 (pp. 265-92), “From Egalitar-ianism to Kleptocracy.” Here, Diamond takes on politics. He is pretty straightforward about linking ever-advancing forms of organization to ever more sophisticated schemes of theft. To Diamond, who has done most of his work among the peoples of New Guinea, advancement brings hierarchy, specialization, standing armies, police, official religion, and resource transfers from the people to the elite and their leader.

Kleptocracy.

Before civilization, we all lived in bands. That’s how most of world was 11,000 years ago. Bands still exist in Diamond’s New Guinea. Bands are the lowest form of political organization: no permanent home, 50-80 people, land jointly used by whole group, no specialization except by age and sex, everybody forages for food. Bands are “egalitarian” societies with no formalized leadership, no monopolies of information or decision-making. Leadership is acquired and passed on through personality, strength, intelligence, and fighting skills.

With farming, beginning around 9000 B.C., society became more sophisticated, and developed tribes centered on villages, one tribe per village, and subdivided into clans, each with own land base. Everybody in a tribe—numbering in the 100s—still knows everybody, but tribes are the upper limit of societies built on personal knowledge. Tribes may have a “big man,” but the position is neither formal nor hereditary. Tribes don’t collect tribute, and the “big man” dresses, lives, and works like everybody else, in an economy based on reciprocal exchanges.

As societies advance they develop chiefdoms, more formalized than tribes and with rules, because the 1,000s to 10,000s of people living together in a large town or multiple villages don’t know each other. In this situation, people have to be able to meet without trying to kill each other. In a chiefdom, the chief has a monopoly on the use of force, has a hereditary job, makes significant decisions, has a monopoly of significant information, dresses and lives differently, and tops a bureaucracy, even though bureaucrats have generalized, not specific responsibilities. Chiefs acquire luxury goods, lead a class society built on slave labor, control all land, collect tribute, and run a redistributive economy. Tribes become part of the chiefdom’s hierarchy, complete with lesser chiefs.

Chiefdoms at worst function as kleptocracies, transferring net wealth from commoners to upper classes.

How do chiefs retain power? They

1. Disarm the populace, and arm the elite.
2. Redistribute tribute in popular ways.
3. By maintaining order, make popular the use of force.
4. Create a religion or ideology that justifies kleptocracy.

Chiefdoms finally evolve into states, the way one finds polities usually organized today. The first formed in Mesopotamia around 3700 B.C. States have kings, a literate elite, visible archaeological hallmarks, a monopoly on classified information, extensive taxation, large scale slavery (until recently), mass production, large public works, mass warfare, vertical and horizontal bureaucratic specialization, laws, a judiciary, police. States and especially empires can be multilingual and multiethnic. States often choose bureaucrats based on training and ability. States can fight and defend themselves because they possess: a) a concentration of resources, and b) a religion or ideology that inspires people to fight suicidally.