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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
authorities he has not established; but a member of a constitutional
State is always a slave because, imagining that he has participated or
can participate in his Government, he recognizes the legality of all
violence perpetrated upon him … 10
Government violence is not restricted to the internal sphere – it
has an external aspect. As Emma Goldman argued, government is
‘an instrument of competitive struggle’ which strives constantly to
expand its influence and prestige. For Rothbard:
The natural tendency of the State is to expand its powers and externally
such expansion takes place by conquest of a territorial area.
Unless a territory is stateless or uninhabited, any such expansion
involves inherent conflict of interest between one set of State rules
and another. 11
Governments pursue the state’s external interests in the same way
as they secure its domestic dominance: by a combination of force
and fraud. For example, in recent criticism of US policy Noam
Chomsky links what he calls government-sponsored terrorism to aid
and arms programmes. In the 1980s he argues, US administrations
turned Central America and the Middle East ‘into a graveyard’.
Chomsky continues: ‘[h]undreds of thousands of people were
massacred – two hundred thousand, approximately’ creating over a
million refugees and orphans and subjecting ‘great masses’ of
others to torture and ‘every conceivable form of barbarism’. In
addition, the US uses trade sanctions, ‘in order to crush peoples’
lives’. Long-standing embargos have prevented food and medicines
reaching Cuba, dramatically lowering health and nutrition rates
amongst Cubans and causing a ‘significant rise in suffering and
death’. 12
Anarchists have offered psychological and material explanations
for the violence of government. The nineteenth-century writer
Charlotte Wilson argued that government was an expression of a
‘tendency towards domination’, a natural though destructive instinct
present in all individuals. 13 The psychological explanation has a
number of variations. In Rand’s hands, it is tied to a tribal, primordial
urge (born in Europe) to conquer, loot, enslave and annihilate.
Anarcha-feminists offer a contrasting view, re-examining the issue
of violence through the prism of feminist critique. On these
accounts, Wilson’s observed tendency becomes gender-specific.
Flick Ruby argues that government violence turns on men’s