societies since they live in a subsistence economy, in which not only they do not have to produce an economic excess but they refuse to do it. In opposition to Marxist's economic determinism, for Clastres, politics was not superstructure; instead it was sui generis, which enabled Amerindian societies to refuse power and statehood. Clastres wrote, In refusing both Structuralism and Marxism, Clastres, in Moyn's words, "presented his own 'political anthropology' as the more plausible sequel or complement to structuralist analysis." Because of his analysis of power and the State, several commentators say Clastres posites an "anthropological anarchism" or exhibits anarchist influences. On power and coercion In his 1969 article "Copernicus and the Savages", Clastres reviewed J. W. Lapierre's Essai sur le fondement du pouvoir politique, in which he said primitive societies were societies without power based on Max Weber's "definition of power as the state-based monopoly on legitimate violence". Clastres, however, argued that power does not imply either coercion or violence, and proposed a "Copernican revolution" in political anthropology: "In order to escape the attraction of its native earth and attain real freedom of thought, in order to pull itself away from the facts of natural history in which it continues to flounder, reflection on power must effect a 'heliocentric' conversion." In another essay, Exchange and Power, he argued that South American Indigenous chieftains are powerless chiefs; they are chosen on the basis of their oratorical talent. And while they have the exclusive right to be polygamous, they have to be generous and offer gifts to their people. However, it was not an exchange: they give and receive each independently; Clastres wrote, "this relationship, by denying these elements an exchange value at the group level, institutes the political sphere not only as external to the structure of the group, but further still, as negating that structure: power is contrary to the group, and the rejection of reciprocity, as the ontological dimension of society, is the rejection of society itself." Clastres then concluded that "the advent of power, such as it is, presents itself to these societies as the very means for nullifying that power." In Le Grand Parler, he argued that "the society itself, not its leader, is the real site of power" and then they can avoid the concentration of power. On torture and war On their struggle against the State, on keeping their society an egalitarian one, however,