[WS:] "What does that mean, exactly? I suspect that this another of those religiously motivated fantasies, like rapture or armageddon, that infest the American political culture - all they carry is emotional connotation but they are devoid of any empirical meaning whatsoever."
[NCT:] You may be right about "American political culture" but that isn't what's driving my analysis. I've been doing quite a bit of research on the history of China (in particular the history of monetary theory and money) lately so imperial China is the model i have in my head for thinking about what state collapse or state power weakening means.
I think you are correct to say that we have to specify what social organization evolves out of a "collapse" and what caused a collapse. i think you're set of examples is very modern. remember that the "world system" (as immanuel wallerstein puts it) that we currently have is very recent. State collapses do happen. they may happen because of peasant rebellions and those rebellions may themselves become a state (Han, Tang, Sung and Ming dynasty for example) but we shouldn't pretend like there is no discernible difference between old and new states or that the new state has just as much control as the old one. Yunnan province in china is a great example of this. Cowrie shells was and is the primary "social currency" (as Graeber puts it) used there. over the centuries, when the Chinese central state is strong, they are able to suppress the shells use. when the state is weak or collapses however, cowrie shells become the primary unit of account. these groups of course have some form of "governance" ("big men' and the like) but it is obviously very different from a state apparatus.
My original point is that depending on the causes and how the collapse actually happens, local private power structures may be able to form a kind of corporate mini-state (hence my reference to Pinkerton cops). if not, I suspect more decentralized forms of exchange and power such as tally sticks,cowrie shells and the like (in the west it will probably take some technological form like a p2p connection system given our modernist self image) would emerge.
-- -Nathan Tankus ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------