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anarchist rejections of the state 67 oppressed in every domain of life, from family, to culture, to state, to economy … and … do so in creative and courageous ways …’. 51 Yet non-anarchists have long argued that the anarchists’ rejection of government, authority and power raise difficult questions about the functioning of anarchy and its realization. How can people co-operate in the absence of rules? How can individuals enter into agreements with others if they refuse to be bound by authority? How can they realize their aims without exercising power? Closer inspection of anarchist thought provides some answers to these questions and suggests that the anarchists’ rejections of government, authority and power are misleading. For the most part, anarchist theories indicate that some forms of government, authority and power can be legitimated. What they deny is that these legitimate forms can flourish in the state. self-government, ‘natural’ authority and ‘social’ power In response to their critics, anarchists demonstrate the redundancy of the state by showing how systems of government and authority can be incorporated into anarchy in a manner that provides social order without repression, uniformity or social division. In addition, they argue that the locus of power distinguishes its legitimate from its illegitimate exercise. anarchism and government The incorporation of government into anarchy rests on a distinction between government and self-government. Anarchists have interpreted this distinction in myriad ways. Kropotkin’s version was grounded on the suggestion, developed through his critique of Marxism, that government could be abstracted from the state. Kropotkin’s argument was that Marxists had wrongly defined both government and state in terms of class. As a result, they had adopted a too narrow view of revolutionary change and limited their ambitions to the alteration of the government’s class character. In his essay The State: Its Historic Role Kropotkin argued: It seems to me … that State and government represent two ideas of a different kind. The State not only includes the existence of a
68 anarchism: a beginner’s guide power placed above society, but also a territorial concentration and a concentration of many or even all functions of the life of society in the hands of a few. It implies new relations among the members of society. 52 Malatesta took up the point. The word ‘state’, he argued, referred to … the impersonal, abstract expression of that state of affairs personified by government: and therefore the terms abolition of the State, Society without the State, etc., describe exactly the concept which anarchists seek to express, of the destruction of all political order based on authority, and the creation of a society of free and equal members based on a harmony of interests and the voluntary participation of everybody in carrying out social responsibilities. 53 Whereas the state described the framework within which government operated, government described a transitory set of political arrangements that could take a number of different forms – democratic, monarchical, aristocratic and so forth. Admittedly, the state coloured the operation of all the forms of government functioning within it. Nevertheless, it was possible to imagine forms of government without the state. Kropotkin supported this suggestion with a historical analysis of the state’s rise, which he located between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in the collapse of the medieval city-states, the concentration of monarchical power in newly centralized governing institutions and the rise of capitalism. Kropotkin did not suggest that the medieval cities were anarchies. Indeed he classified them as states. Nonetheless, he argued that they differed fundamentally from modern states. The ‘essential point’ about them was that the inhabitants had jurisdiction over their own affairs. In contrast to the modern state, power was not concentrated but dispersed through systems of self-administration. Though these systems ultimately failed, they nevertheless demonstrated the possibility of self-government. In the 1960s and ’70s, anarchists excited about cybernetics (the study of communication and control mechanisms, primarily in machines, but also in living things) found the distinction between illegitimate and legitimate government in the concept ‘self-organization’. In contrast to government control mechanisms, self-organizing systems were controlled from within the organism and could respond to their ever-changing diversity. As
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contents Acknowledgements vii intro
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acknowledgements A number of people
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chapter five concluding remarks Stu
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index Page numbers in italic denote
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index 177 Farrow, Lynne 119 fascism
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index 179 and state 30, 45-6, 50, 5
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