FAQAnar:B.2 - Pourquoi les anarchistes sont contre l'État ?
Catégorie:Pourquoi les anarchistes s’opposent-ils au système actuel ?
As previously noted (see section B.1), anarchists oppose all forms of hierarchical authority. Historically, however, the they have spent most of their time and energy opposing two main forms in particular. One is capitalism, the other, the state. These two forms of authority have a symbiotic relationship and cannot be easily separated. In this section, as well as explaining why anarchists oppose the state, we will necessarily have to analyse the relationship between it and capitalism.
So what is the state? As Malatesta put it, anarchists ""have used the word State . . . to mean the sum total of the political, legislative, judiciary, military and financial institutions through which the management of their own affairs, the control over their personal behaviour, the responsibility for their personal safety, are taken away from the people and entrusted to others who, by usurpation or delegation, are vested with the power to make laws for everything and everybody, and to oblige the people to observe them, if need be, by the use of collective force." [Anarchy, p. 13]
He continues:
"For us, governments [or the state]is up of all governors . . . those who have the power to make laws regulating inter-human relations and to see that they are carried out . . . [and] who have the power, to a greater or lesser degree, to make use of the social power, that is of the physical, intellectual and economic power of the whole community, in order to oblige everybody to carry out their wishes." [Op. Cit., pp. 15-16 -- see also Kropotkin's The State: Its Historic Role, p. 10]
This means that many, if not most, anarchists would agree with Randolph Bourne's characterisation of the state as the politico-military domination of a certain geographical territory by a ruling elite (see his "Unfinished Fragment on the State," in Untimely Papers). On this subject Murray Bookchin writes:
"Minimally, the State is a professional system of social coercion . . . It is only when coercion is institutionalised into a professional, systematic and organised form of social control - . . . with the backing of a monopoly of violence - that we can properly speak of a State." [Remaking Society, p. 66]
Therefore, we can say that, for anarchists, the state is marked by three things:
1) A "monopoly of violence" in a given territorial area;
2) This violence having a "professional," institutional nature; and
3) A hierarchical nature, centralisation of power and initiative into the hands of a few.
Of these three aspects, the last one (its centralised, hierarchical nature) is the most important simply because the concentration of power into the hands of the few ensures a division of society into government and governed (which necessitates the creation of a professional body to enforce that division). Without such a division, we would not need a monopoly of violence and so would simply have an association of equals, unmarked by power and hierarchy (such as exists in many stateless "primitive" tribes).
Some types of states, e.g. Communist and social-democratic ones, are directly involved not only in politico-military domination but also in economic domination via state ownership of the means of production; whereas in liberal democratic capitalist states, such ownership is in the hands of private individuals. In liberal democratic states, however, the mechanisms of politico-military domination are controlled by and for a corporate elite, and hence the large corporations are often considered to belong to a wider "state-complex."
As the state is the delegation of power into the hands of the few, it is obviously based on hierarchy. This delegation of power results in the elected people becoming isolated from the mass of people who elected them and outside of their control. In addition, as those elected are given power over a host of different issues and told to decide upon them, a bureaucracy soon develops around them to aid in their decision-making. However, this bureaucracy, due to its control of information and its permanency, soon has more power than the elected officials. This means that those who serve the people's (so-called) servant have more power than those they serve, just as the politician has more power than those who elected him. All forms of state-like (i.e. hierarchical) organisations inevitably spawn a bureaucracy about them. This bureaucracy soon becomes the de facto focal point of power in the structure, regardless of the official rules.
This marginalisation and disempowerment of ordinary people (and so the empowerment of a bureaucracy) is the key reason for anarchist opposition to the state. Such an arrangement ensures that the individual is disempowered, subject to bureaucratic, authoritarian rule which reduces the person to a object or a number, not a unique individual with hopes, dreams, thoughts and feelings. As Proudhon forcefully argued:
"To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so... To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown it all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." [General Idea of the Revolution, p. 294]
Anarchists see the state, with its vast scope and control of deadly force, as the "ultimate" hierarchical structure, suffering from all the negative characteristics associated with authority described in the last section. "Any logical and straightforward theory of the State," argued Bakunin, "is essentially founded upon the principle of authority, that is the eminently theological, metaphysical, and political idea that the masses, always incapable of governing themselves, must at all times submit to the beneficent yoke of a wisdom and a justice imposed upon them, in some way or other, from above." [Bakunin on Anarchism, p. 142] Such a system of authority cannot help being centralised, hierarchical and bureaucratic in nature. And because of its centralised, hierarchical, and bureaucratic nature, the state becomes a great weight over society, restricting its growth and development and making popular control impossible. As Bakunin puts it:
"the so-called general interests of society supposedly represented by the State . . . [are] in reality . . . the general and permanent negation of the positive interests of the regions, communes, and associations, and a vast number of individuals subordinated to the State . . . [in which] all the best aspirations, all the living forces of a country, are sanctimoniously immolated and interred." [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 207]
In the rest of this section we will discuss the state, its role, its impact on a society's freedom and who benefits from its existence. Kropotkin's classic essay, The State: It's Historic Role is recommended for further reading on this subject.
Notes et references
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