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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
is WITHOUT GOVERNMENT: the condition of a people who live
without a constituted authority, without government’. 1 Sébastien
Faure substituted authority for government. An anarchist, he argued,
is someone who ‘denies Authority and fights against’. 2 Likewise John
Zerzan defines anarchism as a synonym for anti-authoritarianism.
For George Woodock, anarchism was about giving ‘men … the bread
of brotherly love, and not the stones of power – of any power’. 3 John
Moore also identified anarchism with the rejection of power. In a
careful analysis of anarchist poststructuralism, he rejected the possibility
of distinguishing between ‘suppressive’ and ‘productive’ forms of
power, insisting that ‘no relationships of power are acceptable’. 4
What do anarchists mean by these claims? What are their specific
concerns? By government, anarchists tend to think of a particular
system of rule, based on violence. In authority they consider the
social relationships sustained by this system, and in power they
consider the means by which government secures its authority. Each
concept is considered in turn.
government and the state
Many anarchists argue that the characteristic feature of government
in the state is violence. The raw view of this relationship is that governments,
be they ‘absolute or constitutional, monarchy or republic,
Fascist, Nazi or Bolshevik’, rule by the use of physical force. The qualified
view is that governments prefer not to rely on the open use of
force and that the ability of governors to secure popular consent usually
makes physical coercion unnecessary. 5 Some anarchists define the
state in terms very similar to those offered by the German sociologist,
Max Weber. For example, Rothbard argues that the ‘state is that organization
in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use
of force and violence in a given territorial area’. 6 Moreover, like Weber,
anarchists tend to explain the actual incidence of government violence
in Machiavellian terms. As a writer in Freedom put it, ‘[e]very
government governs by a combination of deceit and coercion. The
crude ones more by coercion, the clever ones more by deceit’. In constitutional
and democratic regimes, where governments feel secure,
they ‘allow a greater degree of latitude to their subjects’ and govern
through fraud. Where they lack popular support and ‘are too afraid
to allow any measure of liberty at all’, deceit fails and government
relies on violence to force the people into submission. 7 Anarchists
point to the behaviour of governments in moments of tension or