Cliques will certainly differ from one another and are likely to be unequal, much like “soft cliques” already exist today in larger cities. The question is more about how much power a clique should have and how exclusive and encompassing its membership should be, e.g., whether a person can belong to multiple cliques.

The issue (and why states exist) is that powerful cliques end up doing bad things to other less powerful cliques, and usually the dimension of “power” that matters is not the one that you want actually making decisions broadly (e.g. who can be the most brutal and aggressive toward outsiders).