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The Reality of Egalitarianism in Human History

Introduction:

Before beginning a discussion of anarchy as a political option it is important to clarify both what we mean by the term and what the political options actually are from a cross-cultural perspective. This is because popular understandings provided by the corporate media effectively erase the very possibility of anarchism as a political option, and its reality throughout much of human history.

The first misconception which needs to be dispensed with is that anarchy is a synonym for social chaos. It isn't. Anarchism refers to a society without centralized government, or a society without state level political organization. Such societies are common throughout human history. We call them "egalitarian" societies in the anthropological literature.

The corporate media and much of the rest of academia also routinely discuss our political options in such a way as to dismiss the very possibility of egalitarianism as a political option. The usual classification uses a distinction between "left" and "right." The left is pictured as more socialistic or labor oriented in its interests, while the right is pictured as more conservative, and business oriented. In their extremes, the left is Soviet communism, and the right is Nazi Germany.

What goes unmentioned is that the only societies which can be encompassed by this contrast are state level societies. This effectively erases egalitarianism as a political option. In fact, Western political philosophy has a long history of doing this. It was egalitarian societies which Thomas Hobbes was referring to when he so famously claimed that life in a "state of nature" was "nasty, mean, brutish and short." Hobbes claimed that such societies had no government at all because they did not have centralized state institutions. He couldn't have been more wrong. That is why we anthropologists prefer a contrast between /egalitarian/ political systems and /hierarchical/ ones.

The Difference Between Egalitarian and Hierarchical Political Systems:

Egalitarian political systems were typical of most tribal peoples throughout human history. This implies that "anarchism" was the original political philosophy of the human species. Such political systems survived in the world into very recent times, until tribal peoples were violently colonized by the expansion of the capitalist system and the globalization of the state as a near universal form of political organization.

Egalitarian societies were

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