o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

anarchist rejections of the state 49
willingness and ability to dominate women. In her reflections on the
role of women in anti-war campaigns she comments: ‘[i]f the peace
movement is to be successful in putting an end to war, it must work
to eliminate the sex role system which is killing us all by rewarding
dominating aggressive behaviour in men’. 14 The Guerrilla Girls
explore a similar theme, imagining an estrogen-bombed world
where troops in conflict zones ‘throw down their guns, hug each
other, say it was “all their fault”, and clean up the mess’. 15 Perlman,
too, understands government as an expression of maleness. With the
rise of Leviathan, he argues, ‘women become debased, domesticated,
abused and instrumentalized, and then scribes proceed to erase the
memory that women were ever important’. 16
Since the 1960s anarchists have increasingly added an ecological
dimension to the argument. Murray Bookchin associates the
emergence of government-systems with the historic re-casting of the
natural world as a sphere of irrationality, animality and womanhood
and with the withdrawal of men from the domestic sphere to the
realm of public affairs (‘civil society’). Primitivists, though no friend
of Bookchin’s, identify a similar process. Perlman describes the
subjugation of women as the subjugation of Mother Earth and he
counts the cost of the state’s rise in terms of the destruction of
biosphere. Government has its origins in God’s instruction to the
people of Israel to ‘replenish the earth and subdue it, and have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over every living thing that moveth upon the earth’. The Bible
suggests that this instruction was given first by God to Adam
(Gen. 1: 28), but Perlman argues that Moses – the Lenin of the pre-
Christian world – defined Leviathan’s crusade. Either way, the
message was a ‘declaration of war against the Wilderness … against
all life’. Zerzan’s explanation is that governmental forms of rule
arose when human beings lost their ‘awareness of belonging to an
earthly community of living beings’ and discovered a desire to
domesticate (‘bring under control for self-serving purposes’) the
natural world. Once humans had embarked on this process, the next
step was to control and dominate each other through the habitual use
of violence.
The material explanation of violence is that government must
use coercive methods in order to maintain economic inequality.
Anarchists are divided about the causes of inequality. Proudhon
traced the roots of inequality to the right to property. However he
distinguished between two types of right. The first was a right of