Clastres himself never suggested that the social organization of the non-State societies he encountered in the Amazon should be taken up by radicals in civilization. He merely noted that ‘the savages’ had resisted the State — somehow — for a long time, and that they effectively represented the last real human.
Clastres suggests that the goal of these societies is not ‘peace and harmony,’ it is not unification. The ‘community’ that exists within groups and between groups is operational on different levels to the ones we might understand. Their ‘enemies’ are closer to them than our ‘friends’ ever will be, enmity is bound up in their conception of the relations with themselves, and others, even the dead.
‘The savages,’ as Clastres has observed, do not want peace. Peace, since the establishment of the first State, has always been the prize of slaves."
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