Passports weren’t a general concept until the end of the 19th century. Before they were mostly to allow passage to certain areas inside one country, rather than for movement between countries. There have been Identifications for Nobels and Diplomats though.
Anyways the whole concept is mostly a concept of modern nation states not of ancient tribalism.
I think the point is that the tribalism led to the creation of the nations/states in the first place. I don’t know enough to know if that’s true, but that was my interpretation of their comment.
This was also my understanding and I begrudgingly agree with NDT that borders and states and tribalism are bad. I don’t agree with complaining about lines. Damn dude, sucks to have to be a regular participant in society, maybe of bureaucrats got paid better or there were more people working the passport desk.
Or… and i know this is fucking wild, he made up that story because in the US you get passports in the mail. Yeah, you have to maybe wait in a short line for some steps but overall you just send in your info and wait 6 weeks.
The state is formed by the historical mode of production, its like a contradiction that is the resolution to all of the other contradictions present in market social relations. In other words the state is based on how stuff gets made, and who accumulates the value inherent in the stuff, which is in essence the congealed work that went into making that stuff.
Politics and culture is always a factor in what shape the state takes, since politics and culture are social structures and sources of power themselves, but politics is downstream from production
Eh, that’s one view. In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow propose that the State arises from the intersection of three forms of social power. These are sovereignty (control of violence), bureaucracy (control of information), and politics (control through charisma and culture). Historicaly each of these has existed as the basis for societies alone and in combination without the concept of a state.
The State is a meme, a technology like religion or money, which provides a framework for the distribution and application of those 3 forms of power. It isn’t the only possible framework for that, but it’s outwardly destructive nature and self-propogation have ensured that the modern world is structured around a narrow set of configurations of the State.
Drag has seen criticism of the term “tribalism” as it normalises the idea that tribes were bad. Tribes were actually way more sensible than modern governments. Blaming the unique problems of developed societies on indigenous tribes is kinda messed up. Sectarianism is a better word.
