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Title: Means and Ends: The Anarchist Critique of Seizing State Power Author: Zoe Baker Date: May 22, 2019 Language: en Topics: theory, the state, revolution, anti-state, Black Rose Anarchist Federation, anti-authoritarianism, libertarian communism, Breadtube Source: Retrieved on 2019-07-31 from [[http://blackrosefed.org/anarchopac-critique-of-seizing-state-power/]] Notes: See also the video version here: [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsRyTWBj84E]]
The anarchist critique of seizing state power is often caricatured as
being based on an abstract moral opposition to the state that ignores
the harsh realities we are currently facing. Upon carefully reading
historical anarchist authors, however, one discovers that the real
reason why they argued that revolutionaries should not seize existing
state power was because it was impractical for achieving their goals.
These practical arguments were grounded in their understanding of
society. Anarchists held that society was constituted by human beings
with particular forms of consciousness engaging in activity — exercising
capacities to satisfy motivational drives — and in so doing
simultaneously transforming themselves and the world around them. For
example, when workers go on strike a number of fundamental
transformations can occur. Workers can develop their capacities by
learning to engage in direct action and self-direct their lives; acquire
new motivational drives such as the desire to stand up to their boss or
become a dues paying member of a union; and transform their forms of
consciousness, by which I mean the particular ways in which they
experience, conceptualise and understand the world, such as coming to
view their boss as a class enemy or realising that to improve their
situation they have to collectively organise with other workers. Through
engaging in such activity workers not only transform themselves but also
develop new social relations. They form bonds of mutual support and
solidarity with fellow workers while they transform the social
conditions under which they live, such as earning better wages or making
their boss afraid of them. This is often called the theory of praxis or
practice and it is one of the many theoretical commitments that
anarchists and Marx have in common.
For anarchists one of the main consequences of the theory of practice
was that there is an inherent connection between means and ends. The end
goal of anarchism — free or libertarian communism — is a stateless
classless society in which workers collectively own the means of
production and self-manage their workplaces and communities through
councils in which everyone has a vote and a direct say in the decisions
that affect them. These councils would coordinate action over large
areas by associating together into a decentralised system of regional,
national and international federations in which as many decisions as
possible were made by the local councils themselves. This would be
achieved through regular congresses at a regional, national and
international level which would be attended by instantly recallable
mandated delegates that councils elected to represent them. Crucially,
delegates would not be granted the power to make decisions independently
and impose them on others. Decision making power would remain in the
hands of the council who had elected them.
Such a society would be reproduced over time by human beings engaging in
these forms of activity and in so doing continuously creating and
re-creating both communist social relations and themselves as people
with the right kinds of capacities, drives and forms of consciousness
for a communist society. For example, under communism workers within
their local councils would make decisions through a system of direct
democracy in which every member has a vote. Through participating in
these local councils they would not only make decisions but also
reproduce themselves as people who are able to and want to make
decisions in this manner, such as being able to effectively take
minutes, formulate proposals that people will support and make sure that
a small minority of people do not do all the talking in meetings.
People who want to and are able to reproduce a communist society will
not magically come into existence. A communist society can only emerge
through a social revolution that abolishes capitalism and therefore will
have to be created by the people who presently live under capitalism.
Given this, in order to achieve a communist society the majority of the
population has to engage in activities during the struggle against
capitalism itself that transform them into people who want to and are
able to self-direct their lives and their community through local
councils and federations of councils. If this does not happen, then
communism will not be created. This is because for communism to exist
real people must establish and reproduce it day after day through their
own activity.
Revolutionaries therefore have to use means that are constituted by
forms of practice that will actually transform individuals into the
kinds of people who will be able to and want to create the end goal of
communism. If revolutionaries make the mistake of using the wrong or
inappropriate means then they will produce people who will create a
different society to one they initially intended. To quote Malatesta,
it is not enough to desire something; if one really wants it adequate
means must be used to secure it. And these means are not arbitrary, but
instead cannot but be conditioned by the ends we aspire to and by the
circumstances in which the struggle takes place, for if we ignore the
choice of means we would achieve other ends, possibly diametrically
opposed to those we aspire to, and this would be the obvious and
inevitable consequence of our choice of means. Whoever sets out on the
highroad and takes a wrong turning does not go where he intends to go
but where the road leads him.[1]
Anarchists viewed seizing state power as a road that would lead the
working class to a new form of authoritarian class society, rather than
the intended goal of communism. To understand why we need to first
understand what anarchists meant by the state. Through an in-depth
analysis of the state as an actually-existing social structure, both
historically and at the time they were writing, anarchists came to
define the state as a hierarchical and centralized institution that uses
professionally organized violence to perform the function of reproducing
class rule. The state so understood was wielded by a political ruling
class (generals, politicians, high ranking civil servants, monarchs,
etc) in their own interests, and in the interests of the economic ruling
class (capitalists, landlords, etc), against the masses. Kropotkin, for
example, writes that the state “not only includes the existence of a
power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration
and a concentration of many functions in the life of societies in the
hands of a few... A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing is
developed to subject some classes to the domination of other classes.”
The state is therefore “the perfect example of a hierarchical
institution, developed over centuries to subject all individuals and all
of their possible groupings to the central will. The State is
necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian — or it ceases to be the
State.”[2]
Anarchists argued that the state, like all social structures, is
constituted by forms of human activity and so participating in the state
produces and reproduces particular kinds of people and particular kinds
of social relations. This occurs irrespective of the intentions or goals
of people because what matters is the nature of the social structure
they are participating in and the forms of activity this social
structure is constituted by and reproduced through. For Reclus,
socialists who enter the state “have placed themselves in determinate
conditions that in turn determine them.”[3] Those who wield state power
will therefore engage in forms of human activity that will over time
transform them into oppressors of the working class who are concerned
with reproducing and expanding their power over other people. Anarchists
held that this process of socialists being transformed into oppressors
would occur both to socialists who are elected into the currently
existing capitalist state and also to socialists who attempt to seize
the existing state via a coup and transform it into a workers’ state.
Anarchists thought this would occur for two main reasons. Firstly, the
state is a centralized and hierarchical institution in which a political
ruling class monopolize decision making power and determine the lives of
the majority who are subject to their rule. The minority of socialists
who actually exercise state power will therefore impose decisions on and
determine the lives of the working class, rather than enabling the
working class to self-direct their own lives. In Malatesta’s words,
Whoever has power over things has power over men; whoever governs
production also governs the producers; who determines consumption is
master over the consumer. This is the question; either things are
administered on the basis of free agreement among the interested
parties, and this is anarchy; or they are administered according to laws
made by administrators and this is government, it is the State, and
inevitably it turns out to be tyrannical.[4]
Secondly, through engaging in the activity of wielding state power
socialists will be corrupted by their position of authority at the top
of a social hierarchy and be transformed into people who will neither
want to nor try to abolish their own power over others. According to
Reclus,
Anarchists contend that the state and all that it implies are not any
kind of pure essence, much less a philosophical abstraction, but rather
a collection of individuals placed in a specific milieu and subjected to
its influence. Those individuals are raised up above their fellow
citizens in dignity, power, and preferential treatment, and are
consequently compelled to think themselves superior to the common
people. Yet in reality the multitude of temptations besetting them
almost inevitably leads them to fall below the general level.[5]
Socialists who enter the state may initially “fervently desire” the
abolition of capitalism and the state but “new relationships and
conditions change them little by little” until they betray the cause
whilst telling themselves that they are advancing it.[6] In short, to
quote Bakunin, the “habit of commanding” and “the exercise of power”
instill in people both “contempt for the masses, and, for the man in
power, an exaggerated sense of his own worth.”[7]
A state socialist could object to this argument by claiming that states
do not have to be wielded by a minority who constitute a political
ruling class. For anarchists such an objection ignores that states are
necessarily centralized and hierarchical institutions and so can only be
wielded by a minority of individuals at the top who do the actual daily
work of exercising power. For Bakunin,
It is bound to be impossible for a few thousand, let alone tens or
hundreds of thousands of men to wield that power effectively. It will
have to be exercised by proxy, which means entrusting it to a group of
men elected to represent and govern them, which will unfailingly return
to all the deceit and subservience of representative or bourgeois rule.
After a brief flash of liberty or orgiastic revolution, the citizens of
the new State will wake up slaves, puppets and victims of a new group of
ambitious men.[8]
It might be argued in response that although these representatives would
form a minority they would still be workers and so not constitute a
distinct political ruling class. Bakunin replied to this argument by
insisting that such individuals are “former workers, who, as soon as
they become rulers or representatives of the people will cease to be
workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers’ world from the
heights of the state. They will no longer represent the people but
themselves and their own pretensions to govern the people.”[9]
For anarchists, the state not only had negative effects on those who
wielded its power. It would also harm the vast numbers of people who
were subject to it by making them engage in forms of practice that did
not develop them into the kinds of people needed for a communist
society. This is because instead of learning how to self-organize their
lives effectively workers would be subject to the power of a ruling
minority and so be forced to do as instructed. They would learn to obey
and defer to their superiors rather than to think and act for
themselves. Instead of learning how to associate with others as equals
they would learn to put those in power on a pedestal and venerate them
in just the same way that people under capitalism learn to hero worship
so-called ‘captains of industry’ or political figureheads like the
British royal family. As Bakunin wrote, “power corrupts those invested
with it just as much as those compelled to submit to it.”[10]
Given the above, anarchists concluded that seizing and wielding state
power was necessarily based on a means — minority rule by a political
ruling class — which was incompatible with achieving the ends of
creating a communist society based on the self-determination of the
working class as a whole. In theory, the leadership of the workers’
state would organize the withering away and eventual abolition of the
state once it was no longer needed to defend the revolution. In reality,
however, anarchists predicted decades prior to the Russian revolution
that the forms of practice involved in exercising state power would
transform genuine committed socialists into tyrants concerned with
reproducing and expanding their position of power rather than abolishing
it in favor of communism. In Statism and Anarchy Bakunin declared that
although state socialists claim that “this state yoke, this
dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total
liberation of the people; anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the
state, or dictatorship the means”, they ignore that “no dictatorship can
have any other objective than to perpetuate itself, and that it can
engender and nurture only slavery in the people who endure it.”[11] The
workers’ state would claim to be a dictatorship of the proletariat but
would in reality, according to Malatesta, “prove to be the dictatorship
of ‘Party’ over people, and of a handful of men over ‘Party.’”[12]
[1] Errico Malatesta, The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader,
ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 281–2.
[2] Peter Kropotkin, Modern Science and Anarchy, ed. Iain McKay
(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2018), 234, 227. Kropotkin claims that the state
is necessarily centralized and hierarchical multiple times in this text.
See: ibid, 199, 275, 310.
[3] Elisée Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of
Elisée Reclus, ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press,
2013), 147.
[4] Malatesta, Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Ericco
Malatesta, ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 138.
[5] Reclus, Anarchy, Geography, Modernity, 122.
[6] Ibid, 122.
[7] Mikhail Bakunin, Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist
Founder of World Anarchism, ed. Sam Dolgoff (New York: Vintage Books,
1972), 145.
[8] Bakunin, Selected Writings, ed. Arthur Lehning(London: Jonathan
Cape, 1973), 254–5.
[9] Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, ed. Marshall Shatz(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), 178.
[10] Ibid, 136.
[11] Ibid, 179.
[12] Malatesta, A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of
L’Agitazione 1897–1898, ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press,
2016), 27.