The Question of Power: An Interview with Pierre Clastres

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[File is scanned, optimized and OCRed PDF – I’m not aware of a way to improve quality. However, I haven’t seen this anywhere online and think it will be valuable. I have a large, uncompressed file available and will happily facilitate producing a cleaner file if possible.]

Introduction by anti-authoritarian leftist philosopher Miguel Abensour.

“L’Anti-Mythes, a journal published in Caen, France, by some ex-students, focused particularly on the history of the political group Socialisme ou Barbarie and organized a series of interviews with several members viewed as representative of different aspects of the group’s activities: Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Daniel Mothé and Henri Simon. L’Anti-Mythes also published this long interview with Pierre Clastres, which has become a reference over the years. Simple in its exposition, uncompromising on the content, The Question of Power is a crucial introduction to the ethnologist’s thinking.”

This interview with Pierre Clastres reveals the thinking behind his work, such as Society Against the State, which has been highly influential among certain socialist traditions: anarchism, Marxism, and “anti-bureaucratic” communism. Clastres most famous assertion is that politics precedes economic stratification, and that stateless peoples actively resist state formation and hierarchy. This assertion has large scale ramifications for anti-capitalist theory. For his theories of power and state, Pierre Clastres is often called an anarchist anthropologist – influencing contemporary figures in anthropology and the social sciences like James C Scott and David Graeber.