There are no nation states
Posted on December 24, 2016 by Heather Marsh
A tribe’s faces are imprinted on their babies’ brains at earliest memory. The tribe’s smell permeates everything in the surroundings, their voices and music are heard in the womb, their dances are felt in the womb. The baby who has successfully imprinted their own tribe will cry or stare when they see a stranger. For those who were raised on it, leaving tribal land can bring a physical ache worse than the death of a family member. Tribal loyalty to their own land and people is the biggest obstacle to those who would exploit that land. The primary enemy of corporations everywhere is indigenous people. People with land and strong tribal bonds do not need money which is just an artificial, dissociated form of societal approval. Tribes already have their own source of approval in each other and that approval is contingent on them staying with their tribe and fighting for their land. There are still battles fought all over the world to sever or weaken any ties people still hold to their own land and their own nations, to somehow force or trick them into leaving their land and then destroy any chance they ever have of returning.
To remove power from families and nations and install a state governance system of law and corporate dependency, communities around the world were dismantled. Besides efforts to move, murder, terrorize or starve out indigenous communities, there has been a great deal of social destruction caused by state institutions such as schools and churches. The three largest criminal industries, human trafficking, weapons and drugs, are all genocidal in nature and are all deployed by state militaries and corporations in their war against indigenous people worldwide. Indigenous communities which are the most closely attached are ripped apart by social problems until many can no longer stand to watch their people destroyed and drift away. They sacrifice the possibility of the greatest joy through inclusion in a bonded community out of fear of the greatest pain through loss of that community.
The task of the trade economy has been not only to break the bonds between the humans in each society but also to uproot the society itself from any connection to its surroundings. The hallmark of indigenous cultures worldwide is not how long the same social groupings have remained intact (they haven’t) but how long these societies have remained connected to the same wider ecosystems. While nations can be transplanted or migrate to other territories, nations which are pulled from their ecosystems and made to live as landless workers in the trade economy immediately begin to dissociate from each other as they begin to rely on state or corporate institutions to meet their needs. Once people no longer have land, they are at the mercy of the trade economy and they have no choice but to use currency as a dissociated form of approval. This currency can buy them a simulation of everything their tribe once brought them, from acceptance to a comfortable home and food security. Removing people from their land cripples their resistance as the resulting dissociated nation, even when intact, is beset by the social problems which accompany grief, poverty and racism from the wider society and struggling to meet the demands of the trade economy. States then depict nations as ethnic groupings, which they never were, instead of a network of dependencies which was their true nature.
The original tribes and homes are replaced with larger societies grouped around churches, towns and cities. These are not real societies, they are a simulation given as a baby is given a plastic plug to suck on when they are weaned. There is no mutual dependency or shared labour to create community bonds. The cities are not real homes. Corporate downtowns of every city everywhere now have the same stores, the same clothes, the same music, the same factory smells. Houses are investments, not homes. Village elders are replaced by the church. Devotion to an abstract religion preaching slave morality and childlike worship of a Great Man-god replaces devotion to family (ancestor or clan worship) or devotion to ecosystem (animism, sun or solar system deities). Responsibility to your tribe is replaced by dependency on authority. Instead of duties that the entire tribe owes to each member, people are given rights, which must be enforced by a higher authority. Instead of talking to the tribe to ask for help, people are told to pray. Society does not have to be responsible because God is. If God refuses to help, ‘offer it up’ in the afterlife and God will add it to your salvation since humanity refused. If not the church, people are told to go to the union, the police or the Minister of Indigenous Affairs, and in all cases wait in a child-like state for solutions to be doled out instead of creating their own. Dignified, autonomous nations are reduced to children forever sitting in the waiting rooms of the powerful.
Centralized religion was very useful for creating a feeling of national unity across multinational states and was an essential component in establishing the second age structure of trading nations. The religions invented a remote control system where instead of dying literally by being shunned from your tribe, your soul would be condemned in the afterlife if you were shunned from your church. This allowed the churches to extend the power of shunning and inclusion far beyond the original reach of small communities and earthly life.
States attempted to create nationalist ingroup feeling for the state as well through propaganda and manufactured cultural trappings of music, flags and histories as well as outgroup shunning of everyone not in the state. State education taught children a history of state heroes to replace their own social memories and state borders to replace knowledge of their own land. Even corporations have attempted to use group affiliation to create ingroup loyalty in employees. Their chances of success are increased when church members suffer outside persecution, states are at war, or companies force employees to attend retreats and workshops which simulate dependency, but none of these nation-simulations have produced the solidarity of real nations as they are all imposed on dissociated populations with no real dependency on each other.
Allegiance once reserved for tribes has been destroyed and the people have been left dissociated and lost. Attempts to divert social allegiance into state nationalism, class warfare or corporate loyalty have not managed to fill the void left by the acceptance of a complete society. The more dissociation grows, the more vulnerable people are to self-destruction such as drug addiction or allegiance with any society providing unconditional acceptance and self-fulfillment, whether that society is a cult, a racist alliance, a criminal gang or all of them together in a group like ISIS or Boko Haram.
Nation is a concept and a fluid one; it is because its adherents say it is. Even in times when distance, mountains and rivers posed insurmountable barriers to assimilation, when nations were divided by language, dress, laws and beliefs, both the customs and the populations of these nations were constantly evolving. States have no resemblance to nations. States are created by the highly militarized partitioning of societies into economic markets and property ownership, completely regardless of who the people in those states are or how the creation of the state divides and restricts our nations. States attempt to present themselves as prefabricated nations, as if control of property and written laws and constitutions can be applied to populations and everyone in a geographical region will suddenly become bonded with national identity. Everywhere in the world nations such as the Kurds, Kachin, Catalan and many others refuse assimilation and states such as the five eyes prove they will never be anything but corporations.
While nations are living and fluid and variable depending on context and perspective, states are an attempt to freeze one official historical viewpoint for all time. States preserve culture to prevent it from living, keep it steeped in formaldehyde unable to breathe and grow. States seek to divide and categorize. Nations as defined by states are inviolable, to suggest change is sacrilegious, to question perspective or boundaries is deemed intolerable. The reality of layered and overlapping nations, of intersections, of cooperation and flexibility, is denied by the rigid borders and uniformity of states. Traditions of fluid property custodianship, sharing and merging, are rejected for one tradition of rigid ownership clamped down and made law for every region on earth. Ethnic and societal realities of no fixed lines between groupings are ignored for false categorizing. Nations extend families and states divide them. Nations are gathered for community, cooperation and sharing while states are imposed for segregating, competing and allocating.
States insist partitions between identical blocks of people are necessary for safety. The problems associated with trade economy are the same whether ownership is international, national, regional or private and will only be addressed by addressing trade economy. It is no less awful for people to be killed by a foreign corporation pillaging resources than by competing local nations. States did not bring peace to resource conflicts, they brought totalitarian rule by global resource mafia. Diverse nations already do live together and overlap peacefully despite having fought over resources many times in the past and state boundaries do not even stop regional conflict over resources. People in different nations sometimes oppose each others values to the point they wish to shun each other. International boycotts such as the BDS campaign against Israel prove this solution does not require states and indeed and states only boycott for economic interest, not social principles.
Nations are ideas and traditions which exist across borders and generations and they cannot be killed. States are tied to the property they control and they die without militaries and coercive laws to keep them in power. Nations are primarily autonomous, states are corporate markets for the trade economy, fully dependent on other corporate markets. While nations reveled in their diversity, states decree a homogenized sameness, a world where everyone wears the same grey suits, international law assures uniform belief systems worldwide and the trade economy is the one god all must serve to survive. Like agricultural crops, people are raised in the manner most efficient for industry, the same worldwide. Nations are people, states are corporations.
Nations create Us, states create the Other.
As the European trade empires spread, they divided their newly conquered territory into states. Border enclosures were placed around the commons worldwide to more easily claim ownership over resources. At first these states were openly occupied or placed under the control of puppet head of states, as Machiavelli dictated. In time, after the population was fully dissociated and dependent on trade, all of these states won ‘independence’ from their imperial heads of state and progressed to democracies with supposed governance by the people.
In reality, imperial control floated to a level above states, into the supranational third age where real governance was by international trade agreements, debt and the almighty trade economy. The imperial heads of state went home but they left their banks and corporations. Every state is increasingly dependent on the trade economy which demands an insatiable global tribute. People have rarely caused the disruption of culture that the trade economy always does but we are forbidden the free movement of people while every part of the trade economy, from multinational corporations to cartels, operates above the power of the states. States have become a curtain to hide corporate governance, the imperial forces who no one has gained independence from.
Even where state government had power, it was easily controlled. Unlike monarchies, democracies had elections. It is no longer necessary to fight wars to remove rulers if they can just be removed in an election with no resistance from the people. Increasingly, it has cost money to be a political candidate anywhere and those with the money and the inclination to support political candidates are corporations. Merchants also own the most powerful media and drive the dialogue behind the main issues in elections. To people who see jobs as freedom, any suggestion that a candidate would ‘lose jobs’, ‘hurt industry’ or cause the almighty economy to falter is lethal.
Besides the political parties that openly represent corporations, there are supposedly opposing political groups representing the people. These are almost always dedicated to ‘the workers’, identified as those people employed by the corporations. Almost never is there a political party in a democracy that fights for the rights of lifegivers, caregivers, the land, or anyone not involved in the trade economy. If a leader is occasionally elected who does not obey their corporate masters, laws can be changed, courts can be rigged, media is controlled, coups do not have to be the messy business they once were. Just ask Paraguay or Brazil. The people may protest for a time but trading partners all recognize the coups as legitimate government and life goes on with people still pretending they are governed by their state.
When states pretend to respect indigenous governance, they respect indigenous rights to govern within the limits of the state and corporate box they are placed in. Even uncontacted tribes are placed in a state controlled box where they are considered consensual citizens of a government they have never heard of. Ecuador claims the Yasuni as its property to sign mining contracts for[cite] despite their government warning Ecuadorians of the dangers of traveling too far into uncontacted tribal land[cite]. Supposedly autonomous governance for some involves councils governing allocation of funds and property in formerly moneyless, gifting, commons cultures. It is not autonomy if people cannot choose their own economy, membership, and method of governance. Telling formerly borderless nations that they can govern as they wish within borders is ridiculous as the governance they wish is borderless. Living and fluid societies that used continual shunning and adopting, joining and leaving, for their economic and cultural health, have been converted to dead cages and economic markets, an architectured global caste system. Declaring autonomy within those borders is akin to declaring freedom within prison walls.
While societies have always fought to preserve their cultures and control over their regions, this autonomy can be preserved without militarized borders or states. In a democracy, a huge influx of people into a sparsely populated area can overwhelm the existing society and use democracy to change the laws and customs. It is easy and common to write regional constitutions preserving the character of a society and its laws to allow the free migration of people while still preserving the most valued aspects of a culture. This would also allow migratory people to remain migratory. To meet the demands of both regional autonomy and global society and to allow the diversity of lifestyles and societies that are a reality today, states must be replaced with layered and overlapping societies that agree to regional constitutions and specialized collaboration across regional boundaries. There are strains of this type of government appearing in many areas and states are getting in the way.[cite]
Excerpted from Autonomy, Diversity, Society. Citations will be transferred when I get a minute.
