continental ambitions. In time, the office of king was deposed and the plebeians won more rights, establishing the patriarchal, militaristic, imperialistic, and slavery-based Republic that Western thinkers admire so much.
Militarization, in sum, is a culturally driven, non-inevitable process by which the exigencies of warfare—either socially manufactured or imposed by bellicose neighbors—are exploited by an endogenous proto-elite to create a pathway for increasing social discipline and hierarchy. Frequently, militarization functions as a process of communication, even of mutuality, between two adversaries, in which the more decentralized society adopts characteristics of the more centralized one, or both societies at war increase their relative centralization and hierarchy, to win a competitive advantage. This advantage may be illusory, or it may allow one polity to avoid subjugation, but in any case, the winner in any militaristic contest is the principle and model of militarism itself.
I have already argued that decentralized societies enjoy a military advantage in terms of self-defense, but one thing they are incapable of is effectively planning and administering the conquest of a neighboring society. This trend even pertains to anarchist militias in the twentieth century. The Makhnovists in the Russian Civil War and the volunteer anarchist columns in the Spanish Civil War were easily the most effective fighting units in each of those wars, relative to their size and resources, but every time they had to go on the offensive beyond their base territory, they fell into stalemates. The ability for conquest is one “competitive advantage” a militaristic centralization provides. Additionally, chronic warfare can allow a war-making proto-elite to erode or diminish the other social structures and centers of power that hold them in check.
It should be emphasized that militarization is not synonymous with a warlike disposition nor is it antonymous with pacifism. Nor are its military advantages uniformly real, as many societies that have availed themselves of a greater mobility have demonstrated tremendous effectiveness in fighting invading states while increasing, rather than limiting, their decentralization and egalitarianism. It should also be noted that it is not a principle restricted to processes of early state formation. The impact of the Popular Front strategy during the Spanish Civil War was to militarize both the anarchist movement and the social revolution, spelling disaster for both. Militarization in the Spanish Civil War reinstated state power where it had been overthrown. It is in fact from this episode that I draw the name for the phenomenon: militarization was the term batted back and forth in anarchist debates, regarding the demands from the republicans and Stalinists who controlled the government that the volunteer militias be disbanded and incorporated into the regular military.
The Spartans of ancient Greece are depicted as extremely warlike. This vision has come down to us, however, through a notably pro-Athenian historiography. Arthur Evans argues that this picture is the twofold result of the homophobia of modern-day historians (who wish to portray the Spartans as uncultured), and the contemporary Athenians’ fear of a relatively egalitarian Sparta in which women enjoyed higher status and the whole population was armed.
It is true that the early Dorians [whose capital was Sparta] were militaristic, but they were actually less militaristic than the previous Mycenaeans. For example, the Dorians were not dominated by a militaristic aristocracy, and they had no government bureaucracy devoted especially to war, as did the Mycenaeans.45
Homosexuality “was more highly regarded [in Sparta] than it was at Athens during the later classical period,” and women enjoyed a relatively elevated status and could hold property and censure men.46 In an ambitious history, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Arthur Evans traces a direct relationship between militarism, state formation, the emergence of class society, and the intensification of patriarchy, the latter resulting both in a decline of the status of women and in the suppression of homosexuality and transgender identities. From the modern standpoint, Classical Greece and Republican Rome seem to be broadly accepting of homosexuality and even libertine in their sexual practices, but compared with the societies they supplanted, they were in fact conservative. Moreover, as these societies became more militaristic, homosexuality was gradually suppressed, and important political, philosophical, and military leaders played a proactive role in this process.
On many occasions throughout history, it was the very act of conquest that allowed an aggressive society to develop the exploitative and administrative forms necessary to become a state. So far, we have looked at the model of the conquest state using a specific optic: militarization, whereby a relatively egalitarian society cleaves, and masculine organizations, the military brotherhoods of the Romans or the Germans, become a politogen, conquering other populations and forming states. Imitation was another motor in this process, certainly with the Germanic tribes, who had been under the tutelage of the Roman Empire, and probably with the Romans as well, who had plenty of contact with neighboring states or militaristic chiefdoms as they were founding their city.
The Congo basin states, the Lunda, Bakuba, and Baluba, provide a different example. Until the nineteenth century, they had no direct contact with other states. At that point, they adapted their endogenous forms of statist organization, shifting from exacting tribute to seizing captives or condemning criminals, whom they sold to European and Arab-Swahili slave traders. But they already had a state organization prior to Western contact.
These states were constituted by militarily aggressive ethnic groups that conquered other peoples. The Balunda conquered several peoples, such as the Chokwe and Aushi, to form the Lunda state; the Bushongo (shongo was the name of the double-edged blades they used) conquered the Bteng, Pyang, Bangongo, and another fourteen tribes to form the Bakuba state (Bakuba means “men of lightning,” another reference to their weaponry); and the Baluba (whose name means “conquerors” or “destroyers”) conquered the inhabitants of what is now Northern Zambia.47
Initially, the eventual conquerors practiced forms of external exploitation, robbing their neighbors through raiding. Over time, they ritualized and pacified this process; instead of raiding and plundering, they took to exacting tribute. At the time, the Balunda, Bushongo, and Baluba barely practiced internal forms of exploitation, though they had kinship hierarchies based on lineage: families who enjoyed a higher status and so constituted a form of nobility, although there were scant economic structures to differentiate them on a material level.
Eventually, the tribute-paying populations who were nearest and most vulnerable to the political power of the conquerors became fully integrated into a state society, and divided into provinces. War raiding and the exacting of tribute continued against external populations, whereas in the provinces, the tribute took on the form of a civic obligation.
So, while a fisher caught ten baskets of fish, he reserved for himself only four baskets. The rest of it was distributed […] as follows: one basket was for the old men of his village, three baskets were for the village chief and his clan, and two baskets were a tribute in favor of [the] supreme power.48
Land was inalienable, but peasants had to pay a tribute in agricultural goods, as in the feudal system, and to turn over a portion of their catch from hunting and fishing, as described above. They also had obligatory labor duties, corvée labor, but these were irregular, in contrast to many other early states. Any status goods, such as ivory, leopard skins, and eagle feathers, had to be given to the chiefs, who could then redistribute them as status and political needs dictated.
The hierarchies of the conquered peoples were integrated into the new states (showing the wisdom of having horizontal internal relations as a means for avoiding conquest and co-optation by a state).
The chiefs of conquered ethnic groups were also included into the top governmental strata of Kuba, Luba, and Lunda states. But they were forced to recognize the rulers […] as supreme chiefs. Sometimes, these new relations were registered through real [or] symbolic matrimonial rituals between the supreme chief and chiefs of conquered peoples.49
Interestingly, this symbolic matrimonial ritual shows a parallel with the immixtio manuum ritual in the vassalage ceremonies of Western Europe, as pointed out by Jacques
