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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
leaders and those in the ‘driving seat’ of the globalisation process,
lies in the massive amount of power now held by both states and
corporations, particularly those in the US and the West, and all
backed up by advanced technologies of repression, coercion and
weapons of mass destruction. 20
Some anarchists – Nicolas Walter, for example – acknowledge
that ‘every normal person would prefer to live under a less authoritarian
rather than a more authoritarian’ government. 21 Yet anarchist
critiques of government violence tend to encourage anarchists to
blur the differences, sometimes to the point of blindness, between
forms of government and to discount consideration of the motivations
or consequences of government action in favour of prioritizing
the analysis of means. Arguments like Chomsky’s reinforce the idea
that the difference between constitutional and democratic governments,
on the one hand, and tyrannies, on the other, is only a matter
of degree. A familiar cry of anarchist pamphlets is that governments
pay lip service to human rights in order to legitimize external
aggression and exploitation, just as they use welfare and democracy
as instruments of internal coercion. The critique has had two lasting
effects on anarchist practice. The first is on the identification of
anarchist sites of struggle. The only campaigns with which
anarchists readily identify are those based on grass roots rebellion –
for example, the struggles of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories
and of Zapatistas in Mexico. Kropotkin’s decision to support the
Franco-British war effort in 1914 was the exception to prove the
rule: since his action, the idea that anarchists might involve themselves
in disputes between states is treated as anathema. Equally
abhorrent is the idea that anarchists might attempt to harness the
power of the state to ameliorate the effects of the free market. This
rejection of the state is one of the hallmarks of anarchist antiglobalization
protest. One voice puts the view succinctly:
Too much of the time anti-globalization amounts to an appeal to
the state to take account of the wishes of some of its ‘citizens’ and
return to the good old days of social democracy and national sovereignty
when the nation state protected us against the worst excesses
of the corporations … these sort of calls and complaints are quite
simply reactionary … states and governments are complicit in
the process of globalization. We should understand this and act
accordingly. 22