Matt.+Anarchism+and+state

Draft version of a column I am working on:

**Anarchism and the state** By Matthew Brett

=
It is difficult to treat the state as a valued entity in light of recent events. Images stemming from Egypt elicit a degree of horror, as a vast police-state system uses deadly force against its citizens. The internet has been shut down, and media outlets have likewise been silenced. Civil and human rights abuses continue to proliferate at the behest of the faltering Mubarak regime. ======

=
Student activists and other dissidents in Canada are also in the midst of a lengthy healing process following the G-20 protests in Toronto, one of the most vulgar displays of state violence since Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau implemented the War Measures Act in 1970. After an investigation of events surrounding the G-20, Ontario Ombudsman André Marin stated that “the G-20 will live in infamy as a time period where martial law set in the city of Toronto, leading to the most massive compromise of civil liberties in Canadian history.” ======

=
Egypt and the G-20 are just two recent illustrations among many, but they should illicit deep introspection among socialist circles. And while it may seem unreasonable to compare an autocratic dynasty with a supposedly liberal democracy, both states have displayed a monopoly over the illegitimate use of force. Surely, then, the dissolution of both capitalism //and// the state are necessary conditions for the full development of equality and freedom. ======

=
This remains a dividing line, however blurry, between anarchist and Marxist traditions. Neither of these bodies of thought is unified and clearly defined, but there are certain traits that become abundantly clear in reviewing the literature. Engels wrote that for workers to destroy the state in the midst of a revolution “would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries, and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris commune.” ======

=
These sentiments have found their most recent expression in cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, who was asked about the state during the 2009 Marxism conference in Bloomsbury. “Let’s be realistic here. I agree with the whole idea of being against the state.” He then goes on to note that “we should ruthlessly use power. The whole wager of a Communist revolutionary is that you can make the state work against itself.” ======

=
Žižek’s views find wide support among socialist and Marxist circles, content to be revolutionary and utopian, but only to a point. Thus we find geographer David Harvey providing some guiding norms on what an anti-capitalist revolution would entail: ======

"These might include (and I just float these norms here for discussion) respect for nature, radical egalitarianism in social relations, institutional arrangements based in some sense of common interests and common property, democratic administrative procedures (as opposed to the monetized shams that now exist), labor processes organized by the direct producers, daily life as the free exploration of new kinds of social relations and living arrangements, mental conceptions that focus on self-realization in service to others and technological and organizational innovations oriented to the pursuit of the common good rather than to supporting militarized power, surveillance and corporate greed. [...] Of course this is utopian! But so what! We cannot afford not to be."

Many of these guiding norms and values would be widely supported among anarchist circles, but first among the anarchist guiding principles would be dissolution of the state. Harvey is also generally the first to suggest that hierarchically organized communities are necessary in light of technological innovation and the sheer density and complexity of global urban centres. Again, Marxists are revolutionary and utopian, but only to a point. When confronted by the idea of doing away with the state, Žižek turns himself into “a modest British empiricist. Aren’t there some problems here? Do we really know how to move outside the state?” The question should not be //how// to move outside of the state, but whether states should exist at all. If adhering to Marxist historical materialism entails that we “ruthlessly use power” and allow the proletariat to “assert its newly-conquered power,” than this ruthless assertion of power will invariably result in oppression rather than freedom. Or, to quote Bakunin, “the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled 'the people's stick.”

=
“No state, however democratic," Bakunin wrote, “not even the reddest republic—can ever give the people what they really want, i.e., the free self-organization and administration of their own affairs from the bottom upward, without any interference or violence from above, because every state, even the pseudo-People's State concocted by Mr. Marx, is in essence only a machine ruling the masses from above, from a privileged minority of conceited intellectuals, who imagine that they know what the people need and want better than do the people themselves....” “" (//Statism and Anarchy// [1873], in Dolgoff, //Bakunin on Anarchy//, p. 338). ======