Either the State for ever, crushing individual and local life, taking over in all fields of human activity, bringing its wars and its domestic struggles for power, its palace revolutions which only replace one tyrant by another, and inevitably at the end of this development is… death!
Or the destruction of States, and new life starting again in thousands of centres on the principle of the lively initiative of the individual and groups and that of free agreement.
The choice lies with you!
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February 14, 2007 at 7:28 am
Adam
Ah, but without the state you’d have anarchy!
February 14, 2007 at 7:52 am
Maps
Nope. The state is not a bunch of cops or a Ministry of Defence building or a Cabinet table – it is, at bottom, a set of antagonistic social relations between groups of people with different interests. The repressive apparatuses of the state and its bureaucracies came into existence to manage conflict between classes. As long as those different interests and resultant antagonisms exist, the state will continue to exist.
Try a thought experiment: imagine that the Aotearoa Anarchist Federation, membership 100,000, policies broadly in line with what you advocate on this site, has just knocked over the government here. Workers have occupied factories; land in the country is beings seized and collectivised. Schools and neighbourhoods and setting up democratic councils to represent them.
The new society is immediately going to face a counter-revolution from the people who stand to lose everything in an anarchist utopia. They have loads of resources, including guns, and powerful supporters overseas.
In addition, there are all sorts of contradictions emerging in the new society. The dairy farmers (formerly sharemilkers) of the Hauraki Plains have voted through their revolutionary council to strongly resist proposals to phase out factory farming, for isntance, and decide to set up roadblocks to stop organic farmers getting in and setting up a collective. The mine workers’ council at Waihi is confronting local ecological organisations about the future of the massive gold mine in the town. Both appeal to the wharfies’ council in Tauranga, which seized control of the docks there during the first stage of the revolution, when the bourgeoisie tried to bring the army in to end the revolutionary strike get produce out of the country.
If your new society is going to last longer than a week, you are going to need a) some sort of military force, central military command and repressive apparatus to deal with the counter-revolutionaries and b) some effective nation-wide bodies to ham out the direction of the revolution and coordinate the attempts to build a new society. Call them what you will, but effectively these things constitute a state.
On the very rare occasions when anarchists have found themselves playing an important role in a revolution – eg in Catalonia in the 1930s – they have effectively established a revolutionary state.
The only way I can see the state is disappearing is through a) the development of an immensely wealthy society where most work is automated and scarcity cases to breed social conflict or b) the destruction of modern society in toto, and a reversion to some sort of hunter gathering. The first scenario would involve massive industrial development, which you oppose; the second would involve a mass die-off, which I’m sure you’d also oppose.
We’re stuck with the state, but there’s a difference between a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ state and a state controlled by and run for the benefit of capital. We should go for the former.
February 15, 2007 at 12:32 pm
georgedarroch
Kropotkin says… eat your vegetables!
February 15, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Larry Gambone
K. was right about the end product of the State being death. The way things are going humanity and most of the biosphere won’t last much longer unless we get rid of the State with its wars, its corporations that are destroying everything.
February 15, 2007 at 11:07 pm
anarchafairy
Haha… and I thought it was such an innocuous post! Ok Scott, here goes…
The repressive apparatuses of the state and its bureaucracies came into existence to manage conflict between classes. As long as those different interests and resultant antagonisms exist, the state will continue to exist.
It depends on your definition of the State. When I talk of the State I don’t mean its most recent incarnation in the Nation State, but rather all organised systems and apparatuses of coercion that have existed. This includes the Nation State, but also includes older forms such as classical States, the Roman system and Empires generally, medieval kingdoms, etc.
I don’t think class systems and States can be separated. Class systems absolutely and always require some form of apparatus of coercion with which to enforce the power of a minority over the majority. At times, these States and these ruling classes have been one and the same, in capitalism however there is an apparent separation between the ruling classes and the State.
Of course, this separation is real to some degree, and the State and its forms of power can develop interests of their own, and these can at times come in conflict with the economic ruling classes. These tensions are always being played out.
I should be clear, I am not opposed to just one form of domination such as capitalist relations, but domination/power itself. It seems hardly worth fighting against capitalist domination to replace it with State domination (which usually, and historically, has meant a fusion and alignment of ruling class and political classes into a single force of oppression), even if said state is reportedly acting in my interests.
imagine that the Aotearoa Anarchist Federation, membership 100,000, policies broadly in line with what you advocate on this site, has just knocked over the government here.
I hardly doubt for a start that an organisation so all-encompassing and high up would have “policies”. Anarchist federations are only a tool to allow for the local groups to coordinate their own affairs with one another, to organise collectively, but ALWAYS autonomy remains at the local level. Having policies as a federation would seem unduly centralised, and meaingless in any case as no horizontal federation would ever be able to enforce policies (always respecting local autonomy, no apparatus of coercion [it's not another name for a State after all!]).
you are going to need a) some sort of military force, central military command and repressive apparatus to deal with the counter-revolutionaries
No, not unless you want to resurrect the very means of our own oppression. Opposition to those seeking to reinstate systems of domination must always be done through decentralised and horizontal forms. The militias of Spain in ‘36, before their systematic disintegration and deliberate starvation of arms by the communists, are the perfect example of this. They organised, before any republican army or police force could even act, to oppose the fascist coup by firstly disarming the fascist armies and then fighting a prolonged war. All militias retained autonomy, decisions were discussed and voted upon, etc. Perhaps not as efficient as a regular army, but it was just as effective despite the backstabbing by their comrades and, more importantly, didn’t recreate any sort of State oppression.
b) some effective nation-wide bodies to ham out the direction of the revolution and coordinate the attempts to build a new society.
Again, no. And again, take the Spanish revolution. Factories were collectivised according to the initiative of those workers, and a variety of forms of self-management were used. The rural collectives also happened spontaneously and included a number of forms, including some communist ones and others working on collectivist models (communism was not widely advocated prior to the revolution). All power must remain at the bottom.
Obviously some things need to be coordinated on wider scales, but the same horizontal decision-making that characterised the CNT prior to the Spanish Revolution could just as easily be used afterwards. Coordination does not require centralisation.
On the very rare occasions when anarchists have found themselves playing an important role in a revolution – eg in Catalonia in the 1930s – they have effectively established a revolutionary state.
And virtually every anarchist will tell you this was their failing. Immediately after the revolution things progressed at great pace at a local level. A few well-known anarchists, however, failed to practice what they preached. Rather than destroying the Catalonian State once and for all, they let its shell remain, only to strengthen itself later. As these leaders gradually became more and more coopted into the resurgent Catalan State they legitimised all number of counter-revolutionary actions that removed autonomy from the rural and workplace collectives, reinstated boss-worker relations in factories (“for efficiency to guarantee victory against the fascists”). Against everything anarchists had advocated, rather than calling for “revolution and war” like most anarchists were doing, they called for “win the war first, then the revolution”.
Of course, this could only happen due to several major weaknesses with the CNT, identified well in Stuart Christie’s book “We the Anarchists”, the most important being the lack of horizontal structures that allowed these self-appointed leaders to exert power and direct the revolution themselves. That is, the main critique of the Spanish Revolution by anarchists is not that they didn’t provide enough direction etc., but that they didn’t oppose the State form enough, that they came to recreate State-based practices and centralisation. This set the way for the Communists to take control of the State, to make the POUM and then the CNT/FAI illegal and to kill any hopes of a revolution in Spain.
We’re stuck with the state, but there’s a difference between a revolutionary workers’ and peasants’ state and a state controlled by and run for the benefit of capital. We should go for the former.
No, no there’s not.
February 16, 2007 at 10:49 am
Maps
While your reply’s interesting, it doesn’t deal with any of the concrete examples of post-revolutionary problems I gave.
How about the clash between the mining workers and the ecologists? Confrontations like that are going to be replicated a hundred thousand times in any revolution. Without some sort of coordinating mechanisms on a national and (hopefully) international scale how are you going to solve any of them? Do you think the ecologists and the miners could ham it out themselves? Maybe they could, but what about the tens of thousands of people who are also affected by the decision they reach? The wharfies who load the gold onto ships for export, or the workers in the service sector who live indirectly off the wealth created by the mine? And how about the workers at the factory in Indonesia which is processing the gold and turning it into a product which they rely upon to keep them alive? Do these diverse groups of people not to get to contribute to the decision? If they do, what sort of mechanism could incorporate them? Surely not a purely local mechanism?
Any post-feudal economy is extremely complex, with its parts linked together on a national and, indeed, international scale. That’s why real democracy has to exist not just locally, but also nationally and, ultimately, internationally. I agree about the importance of small-scale local democratic institutions, but there will be many occasions where decisions have to be made by millions of people. (Wouldn’t it be great to see global referenda on decisions affecting the whole planet, like global warming, in place of shady backroom deals by bureaucrats at the UN? What a great tool for promoting global consciousness and breaking national and confessional barriers global referenda would be!)
At the end of the day, your vision of an anarchist society seems to rely on a belief that almost all conflict and contradiction would melt away once the state was dismantled. Freed of the impositions of the IRD and the like, we’d all decide that we want go vegan, live in communes in the countryside, abandon all racist and prejudiced thinking, and make all our decisions by consensus. But the simple, purely local decision-making structures you favour immediately fall apart if significant numbers of people disagree about the direction the new society should take.
I agree with you that the anarchists should have destroyed the old bourgeois state in Catalonia. But they could only have done this by creating a new, revolutiuonary state. The tragedy was that they at first refused to do this, and then, as it became obvious that the myriad problems of overturning capitalism and defeating fascism could not be solved without a state, they turned to the old, bourgeois state and cooperation with the Stalinists who were strangling the revolution.
But your definition of the state goes even further than that used by most class struggle anarchists. You consider any coercive institution to be a state, or part of a state. But the Spanish anarchist militia you want to counterpose to a state clearly were profoundly coercive. Nothing is more coercive than shooting people who oppose your political agenda, as the militias (rightly) did to fascist counter-revolutionaries. Your belief in the sanctity of local decision-making also seems opposed to the federationist model of organisation of the CNT. It seems to me that your argument has one foot in class struggle anarchism and one foot in primitivism.
Re the Spanish aanrchist thing, you might be interested in this Greville Texidor piece we’re publishing in brief:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/12/from-revolutionary-spain-to-1940s.html
February 16, 2007 at 10:57 am
Maps
‘K. was right about the end product of the State being death.’
Nope. Check out the fall in infant mortality rates in Veenzuela since the state ceased being a cashbox for the comprador bourgeoisie and started diverting oil wealth into areas like health and education and working with grassroots community orgs to better deliver those services. Check out the number of people who’ve been saved from blindness by cataract operations, and the almost total elimination of illiteracy amongst adults in a few short years. Venezuela is far from a perfect society, and the revolution there is far from complete, but even with all its imperfections it shows that the state can be a force for life rather than death. The lives of kids are more important than political dogma.
February 16, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Larry Gambone
Maps, we are talking about the GENERAL nature of the state – which is death, if you read history, NOT this or that state which engages in social democratic reforms which help people. Anarchists are not against such reforms but only say that in the long run they would be better handled by a federation of communities and not a top-down authoritarian structure like the state. Put it this way as a metaphor, we could well say that the police are reactionary and oppressive, in a general sense. Of course, there are officers who aren’t such a bad sort and turn a blind eye on kids smoking pot etc, but nonetheless if ordered to attack a protest he/she will do so.
February 16, 2007 at 12:49 pm
Maps
The trouble with talking about ‘the general nature of the state’ is that
it assumes that every sort of state, from the ‘commune state’ of 1871 to the Third Reich to the de facto state that existed in Catalonia in 1936 to
the complicated and contradictory arrangement that exists in Venezuela at the moment, has a set of qualities which are invariable, regardless of which social group controls the state, and what forms the state institutions take.
It is this sort of thinking which has led the Committee for Anarchist Relations, the largest anarchist group in Venezuela, to oppose the progressive policies of the Venezuela government, like the redistribution of land to the landless and the massive health and education programmes, on the grounds that they are state programmes, and to march with the fascist right against the government during the CIA coup of April 2002.
An analogy can be made with technology. Unlike some (though of course not all) types of anarchist, I don’t think that any form of technology is inherently bad: what matters is who controls technology, and what use is made of it.
Your cop metaphor doesn’t work, because the good cop you’re decribing is merely benignly indifferent. In Venezuela, by contrast, the state is changing the lives of millions of people, through measures like the health and education Misiones and land reform. And the state itself is being changed as this process goes on, finding new institutions like the Communal Councils and worker-run factories that change that represents the interests of a new class. The CRA calls this incipient fascism. I call it bloody good news for millions of people lifting themselves out of poverty and misery.
February 16, 2007 at 1:15 pm
Maps
On your other point: I can imagine that a Federation of Communes (as opposed to atomised Communes) could be one form that a post-capitalist society could take. These Communes could act as democratic decision-making in particular neighbourhoods, worksites, schools, and so on, and then come together, in a sort of soviet of soviets, to co-ordinate the building of the new society.
But does this have to be the only form that a post-capitalist society could take?
There does seem to be an attachment even amongst class struggle anarchists with decentralised decision-making based in a particular geographic locale.
But is there really some sort of rule that democracy can only be maintained on a small local scale? In the age of the internet and global communications, can’t we also create forms of mass democracy involving people quite separated in space?
This could involve the establishment of ‘Communes’ representing constituencies that extend across borders. For instance, there could be an international ’soviet’ or Commune representing disabled people and discussing and raising their issues, using tools like the internet as an aid. We could also see the growth of international debates and votes on issues of international significance, like (say) global warming. We already see some steps towards this sort of mass cross-border organising in the activist left and (imperfectly) in the trade union movement, which is beginning to establish de facto international unions.
It seems to me that, rather than prescribing one organisational form which equals post-capitalism and democracy, we need to be open to what is being created by people in struggle. It’s interesting that the soviet was thrown up almost spontaneously by workers in 1905, taking the far left by surprise.
The tradition I belong to argues that the Maori struggle against colonialism in the 19th C threw up a whole new mode of production:
http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/search?q=beyond+the+treaty
I’m sure new blueprints are being developed today in a place like Venezuela.
Sorry about all these posts, btw – I’m sitting waiting for a phonecall!