The Small Farm Future Blog

The state I’m in

Posted on August 16, 2026 | 1 Comment

A few further thoughts in this post on the matter of the state – what it is, what its past and future involves, and what does it mean to live within the jurisdiction of a singular state (‘the state I’m in’)? – arising out of discussions under my last post.

But first, to go with the wordplay of my title, something a bit more autobiographical about my personal state. Which is, for one thing, quite busy with some other writing and life projects, so posts here are likely to be sporadic at best in the near future, although I hope I’ll have a few more things to share soon.

Also, I’m wrestling with some issues that are making me grumpier than usual, which may or may not be relevant to my recent ban of a commenter on Substack for the first time. Writing about ‘renewable’ energy seems to be a particular flashpoint these days, with people routinely wanting to take me to task for being either too sceptical or not sceptical enough about the possibilities for a transition of the existing global energy system to low-carbon sources (my position in a nutshell: it’s not going to happen).

Anyway, a commenter apparently of the latter persuasion wrote in response to my post tracking the latest global energy figures, “Look up ‘Jevon’s paradox’ so we can read useful articles. Tyvm”. Regardless of the point that Jevon’s paradox seems irrelevant in this instance, I find the tone of such comments objectionable and I don’t think I’m up for hosting them. Subsequent engagement with the commenter got worse, but anyway … I’m open to (polite) counterarguments, but I think my general position nowadays is that politeness and not talking down to me are basic requirements of online discussion with me on my websites. My tolerance for ad hominem insults has become increasingly low.

I am, on the other hand, more open than I used to be to waving through political opinions that I find problematic or objectionable (short of incitement to violence or unmitigated bigotry), provided the politeness criterion is met. But, just to mention, I’ve been kind of shaken and saddened by the Jason Arday story recently. It’s a sh*tshow in which none of the main players emerge looking rosy, but ultimately someone lost their life who probably wouldn’t if they hadn’t been black. An old story. Hence a polite request to avoid phrases like ‘DEI hire’ on my sites.

But moving on now to the main business of this post: the state – what is it, where did it come from, and where is it going?

Every human society involves government in the sense of collective, supra-individual and supra-familial forms of political organisation (the anthropologist in me wants to immediately deconstruct all those terms, but I’ll resist the temptation). However, not all forms of government involve a state. So, what is a state? People usually talk about it as if it’s obvious, but as is often the case, the more you try to home in on a definition, the more it slips between your fingers.

Pioneering sociologist Max Weber offered probably the most famous definition of the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”. The problem with this as I see it is that it begs the question – what can possibly make physical force legitimate to those at the sharp end of it? ‘Legitimate violence’ is an oxymoron, especially in societies that emphasise individualism as a value, like the modern western ones that have done the most to emphasise the singular power of the state.

The benefit of Weber’s definition is that it at least directs our attention to something important: how is legitimacy effected, how do some human communities succeed in making their violence seem justifiable? In practice, the main answer has been through imperfect but quite successful historical processes of creating legitimacy through developing a sense of a sacred, unified nation for which the governing body acts as guardian, using the primarily intellectual labour of poets, writers, folklorists, historians, artists, musicians, cartographers, soldiers and suchlike.

Another (twin) aspect of the state that’s evident in its early manifestations like the ancient agrarian states analysed by James Scott (particularly in his book Against the Grain) is their ability to trap people within their territorial jurisdictions and to make them visible to state power through bureaucracy and record-keeping. Scott shows how the early states often failed in this task and collapsed, but ultimately figured out ways of succeeding – mostly by setting themselves up in such a way that the other options facing ordinary people were worse. So … violence, sacred legitimacy, bureaucracy, authoritarian capture = the state, more or less.

The journey from those original agrarian states to the present world system of states (what I call the ‘sun state’ in Finding Lights, given the uniform gravitational pull of state power towards its centre for everyone living within its territorial limits) has been long and tortuous, and only really completed in the twentieth century. That century also saw the completion of capitalism as the economic basis of global livelihood-making and livelihood-breaking. The modern state has had a curious role in that process, both as the orchestrator and instigator of the global capitalist economy (in ‘capitalist’ and ‘communist’ countries alike) and also to a greater or lesser degree as a bulwark against the destructive effects of that economy on ordinary people, in the form of the contemporary welfare capitalist state. So much so that, in contrast to previous eras, if modern states ceased their functions overnight, most people in the world would probably die in short order.

This latter reality is why it’s so easy for present-day pro-state/pro-capitalist neo-Malthusians to dismiss those of us arguing for the need to build local self-governing agrarian resilience as ‘the cruel fantasies of well-fed people’, or related jibes. The problem with this, aside from its tendency to misrepresent agrarian localism as merely elitist or nostalgic, is that it neglects the multifaceted disorders now unavoidably inflicting contemporary welfare capitalist states. These encompass the squeezes of energy, materials, climate change and nature loss, the demise of economic growth, the crisis of state legitimation and the crisis of state welfare capitalism. Agrarian localism may be a long shot, but don’t expect the existing systems of commerce and state power to be there for you.

How all this plays out in any given place is anybody’s guess. Various commenters under my previous posts have expressed the view that further projection and entrenchment of state power and violence is likely, and indeed is already happening. I agree, but a lot of this projection lacks legitimacy in Weber’s sense and will not deliver the (literal and non-literal) goods that previous projections of state power did during the emergence of the modern world-system of states. That doesn’t mean the state will simply wither away and disappear, but I think it does mean that local micro-politics around material livelihoods and wellbeing will get complex and interesting (‘interesting’ being different, of course, from ‘good’), with many gradations of state, non-state and anti-state actors crowding the local political field.

I tried to give a sense of some of the ways I can see this playing out in my own region in Finding Lights, and perhaps I’ll try to return to it in future writings. Meanwhile, I find it frustrating that so much everyday political discussion is still focused around what the state in the form of The Government should or shouldn’t be doing. State power and agencies will increasingly be almost as hapless in the face of emerging circumstances as the rest of us ordinary citizens, and I think it’s about time we gave more attention to politics outwith ‘the state’.

To cite David Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, albeit from a slightly different context, “…we may well discover that “the state” that consumed so much of our attention never existed at all, or was, at best, a fortuitous confluence of elements of entirely heterogeneous origins (sovereignty, administration, a competitive political field, etc.) that came together in certain times and places, but that, nowadays, are very much in the process of once again drifting apart” (On Kings, p.22).

Anyway, I’m interested in further discussions about how state power might mesh or fail to mesh with local politics and local livelihood-making in challenging future times. To put it another way, using the terminology I coined in Finding Lights, I’m interested in how the sun or supernova aspects of state power might engage in particular corners of the solar system. I’m not so interested in suns and solar systems in themselves.

Meanwhile, I shall shortly be voting in a local election for a new councillor, after my friend Mick had to resign his role following his prison sentence for climate protesting. Legitimation crisis indeed.