o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

chapter two
anarchist rejections of
the state
Anarchism … is more than anti-statism. But government (the state)
because it claims ultimate sovereignty and the right to outlaw or
legitimate particular sovereignties, and because it serves the interests,
predominantly, of those who possess particular spheres of power, stands
at the centre of the web of social domination; it is appropriately, the
central focus of anarchist critique.
(David Wieck, in Reinventing Anarchy, p. 139)
… the modern State is the organizational form of an authority founded
upon arbitrariness and violence … It relies upon oppressive centralism,
arising out of the direct violence of a minority deployed against the
majority. In order to enforce and impose the legality of its system, the
State resorts not only to the gun and money, but also to potent weapons
of psychological pressure. With the aide [sic] of such weapons, a tiny
group of politicians enforces psychological repression of an entire society,
and, in particular, of the toiling masses, conditioning them in such a
way as to divert their attention from the slavery instituted by the State.
(Nestor Makhno, The Struggle Against the State and
Other Essays, p. 56)
The state has generated some of the most powerful images in
anarchist writing. Following the German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche, Emma Goldman described the state as a ‘cold monster’,
an inhuman and murderous being. Fredy Perlman, a writer associated
with primitivism, used the image of Leviathan referring to
the idea of the state as outlined by the seventeenth-century British
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