o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

anarchist rejections of the state 69
John McEwan argued, the latter were potential models for anarchist
organization:
The basic premise of the governmentalist – namely, that any society
must incorporate some mechanism for overall control – is certainly
true … The error of the governmentalist is to think that ‘incorporate
some mechanism for control’ is always equivalent to ‘include a
fixed isolatable control unit to which the rest, i.e. the majority, of the
system is subservient’. This may be an adequate interpretation in
the case of a model railway system, but not for a human society. 54
To give a final example: modern Kropotkinites have captured the
distinction between government and self-government by contrasting
two understandings of the word ‘rule’. In the Bulletin of the Anarchist
International Scandinavian anarchists argue that one is referring to
the settlement of disputes ‘in an orderly way’ and the other to
‘regulation’. The English language, they continue, has only one word
to describe these ideas. As a consequence, anarchists have wrongly
been encouraged to consider both illegitimate. In their view, the
English standard must be rejected in favour of the Scandinavian
language model, which captures these different meanings in separate
words. Anarchism, they believe, is open to the first idea of ‘rule’ and
closed only to the idea of regulation.
anarchism and authority
The possibility of incorporating authority into an anarchist framework
turns on the distinctions anarchists sometimes draw between
types of authority. There are two strands to the arguments. The first
is based on a distinction between being in and being an authority,
and the second between natural and artificial authority.
In the first instance, anarchists classically associate ‘in’ authority
with the authority of the state. As Jeremy Westall writes: to be
‘in authority is to have powers of coercion’. Being an authority can
mean a variety of things. Westall’s idea is that it describes a form of
advice. A person with authority is ‘a person who is competent and
well versed in a specific subject’. 55 Bakunin, however, identified
legitimate authority with instruction as well as advice. In a discussion
of education he argued that ‘authority… is legitimate, necessary
when applied to children of a tender age, whose intelligence has not
yet openly developed itself’. Its purpose was ‘the formation of free