"Hence, it’s the political break that is decisive, and not the economic transformation. The true revolution in man’s history is not the Neolithic, since it may very well leave the previously existing social organization intact; it is the political revolution, that mysterious emergence – irreversible, fatal to primitive societies – of the thing we know by the name of the State. And if one wants to preserve the Marxist infrastructure and superstructure, then perhaps one must acknowledge that the infrastructure is the political, and the superstructure is the economic. Only one structural, cataclysmic upheaval is capable of transforming primitive society, destroying it in the process: the mutation that causes to rise up within that society, or from outside it, the thing whose very absence defines primitive society, hierarchical authority, the power relation, the subjugation of men – in a word, the State”.

Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, 1974