Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

only
model 
of true power, but simply a 
particular case
, a concrete realization of political 
power in some cultures” (
ibid
. 22).
In other words, even non-state societies have political power. The difference is simply that they 
use that power as a check on coercive capabilities, rather than as a means of inflicting coercion.
It is here, in the internal relations between chief and tribe, that we catch our first glimpse of 
centrifugal power – a way of organizing power such that challenges rather than reinforces 
centralizing and monopolizing tendencies. 
If power is used to check centralization, then we will need to specify what functions the 
chief serves, what power those functions provide him with, and how, despite the foregoing 

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consideration, how the chief nonetheless does not resemble a state nor monopolizes power.
According to Clastres (
ibid
. 29)
 
there are three distinctive features of an Indian leader or chief: 1) 
He is a peacemaker, the agent who moderates and mediates conflicts; 2) He must be generous 
with his possessions; 3) He must be a good orator. In regards to the first characteristic, despite 
its surface similarity to Hobbes’ common judge, the Indian chief takes a much different form.
He must appease quarrels and settle disputes – not by employing a force he does 
not possess and which would not be acknowledged in any case, but by relying 
solely on the strength of his prestige, his fairness, and his verbal ability.
More 
than a judge who passes a sentence, he is an arbiter who seeks to reconcile
” (
ibid
. 
30). 
In this sense, while he serves a similar dispute-resolution function as a state, the chief is not 
sovereign. Regarding the second characteristic of generosity, the chief is required to constantly 
present gifts and share food with others and any attempt to avoid such gift-giving is met with a 
withdrawal of power and prestige. Clastres (
ibid
. 30 – 31) cites Francis Huxley, an 
anthropologist who lived about the Urubu Indians of Brazil, as saying, “In some Indian tribes 
you can always tell the chief because he has the fewest possession and wears the shabbiest 
ornaments.” In this sense, Indian societies separate political power from economic power and, in 
doing so, provide a strong check against the emergence of a state, which has the capacity to use 
force to secure valuable resources and enact a particular division of labor. The third 
characteristic of the chief is his oratory skills, which suggests an important connection in Indian 
societies between speech and political power. However, there is a key difference. “Indian 
societies do not recognize the chief’s right to speak because he is the chief: they require the man 
destined to be chief prove his command over words. Speech is an imperative obligation for a 
chief” (
ibid
. 153). Therefore, it is more accurate to say that one who commands speech is 
afforded political 
prestige
, rather than to say that one who has political 
power
has the right to 

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speech. This intriguing reversal suggests that the chief is not the locus of power as the state is.
Instead, power rests within the political community. While the chief is responsible for solving 
conflicts, he is only given the power to do so as long as he does so successfully. Moreover, the 
chief is not a judge who mandates a solution.
The chief’s word carries no force of law
. If the effort to persuade should fail, the 
conflict then risks having a violent outcome, and the chief’s prestige may very 
well be the casualty, since he will have proved his inability to accomplish what 
was expected of him…The chief is there is serve society; it is society as such – 
the real locus of power – that exercises its authority over the chief…primitive 
society would never tolerate having a chief transform himself into a despot (
ibid
. 
206 – 07). 
All of this should make clear that the chief does not only fail to meet the criteria of a 
primitive state because the chief is not even the real center of political power. He does not and 
cannot issue demands and the people of the tribe are under no obligation to obey. The real locus 
of power is the community itself, which respects and recognizes the chief only insofar as he 
continues to be socially useful. 
Despite the severe restrictions on his power, however, the chief serves vital roles for the 
community. In addition to his role as mediator, the chief is also a kind of community planner 
and representative to the outside world. Though the chief plans the economic and ceremonial 
activities, he does not give orders in the sense that he has no mechanism for enforcing them. The 
group’s willingness to follow the chief is always fragile and contingent upon their approval.
That the savage chief does not hold the power to command does not make him 
useless: on the contrary he is vested by society with a certain number of tasks 
[such as representing the community to outsiders, planning ceremonies and 
mediating conflicts within the tribe], and in this capacity, can be seen as a sort of 
unpaid civil servant of society (
ibid.
89).
In this way, Indian society has performed an ingenious twist: on the one hand, enabling 
an individual to perform some of the critical functions a state serves and, on the other hand, 

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effectively stripping the person the one with the most potential for achieving state-like political 
power of such opportunity and, moreover, continuously extracting gifts from him. David 
Graeber (2004, 22 – 23) brilliantly describes how this system functions to effectively 
incapacitate greedy or power-hungry individuals: 
In gift economies there are, often, venues for enterprising individuals: But 
everything is arranged in such a way that could never be used as a platform for 
creating permanent inequalities of wealth, since self-aggrandizing types all end up 
competing to see who can give the most away. In Amazonian (or North 
American) societies, the institution of chief played the same role on a political 
level: the position was so demanding, and so little rewarding, so hedged about by 
safeguards, that there was no way for power-hungry individuals to do much with 
it.”
When focusing on the Chief-Tribe relationship a centrifugal organization of power allows for a 
chief to resolve conflicts but quite effectively prevents the chief from becoming a state-like 
entity that issues commands which people are obligated to obey. In doing so, the politics of the 
Indian then are designed precisely to prevent the rise of the state by ensuring that the chief – who 
occupies an important and potentially powerful social location – never actually takes power 
away from the society he is intended to serve. While in statist society it is the people who are 
under surveillance, [i]n the tribe, the chief is under surveillance…If the chief’s desire for power 
becomes too obvious, the procedure put into effect is simple: they abandon him, indeed, even kill 
him” (Clastres 1994, 91). Or, consider the words of Chief Alaykin explaining his position to a 
Spanish officer: “The Abipones…follow their own bidding and not that of their cacique. I am 
their leader, but I could not bring harm to my people without bringing harm to myself; if I were 
to use orders or force with my comrades, they would turn their backs on me at once” (Clastres 
1987, 208). Thus, Indian societies show us the possibility of a politics and an organization of 
power that does not rely on or lead to a sovereign state, or a “separate organ of political power” 
(
ibid
. 165). 

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