{"agent_id":"kropotkin","agent_name":"Peter Kropotkin","slug":"against-the-state-and-against-marxism","label":"Against the state and against Marxism: is the state a specific instrument of domination that a revolutionary 'workers' state' will only entrench, rather than dissolve?","topic":"Against the state and against Marxism","question":"Is the state a specific instrument of domination that a revolutionary 'workers' state' will only entrench, rather than dissolve?","position":"The state is not the eternal form of human society, nor a neutral tool that good hands may turn to good ends. It is a definite historical growth, born in the sixteenth century out of the alliance of the military chief, the judge, the priest, and later the capitalist, and it grew precisely by destroying the free cities, the guilds, the village communes — the whole dense fabric of mutual aid and self-government that men had built from below. Its essential function is not the common good but domination: concentrating power and wealth and defending them. From this the cardinal error of the state socialists follows plainly. They propose to capture the state, to seize its machinery and wield it for the workers, confident that it will afterward wither away. It will not wither. Power concentrated does not dissolve itself; the men who hold it acquire interests in holding it, a bureaucracy forms around it, and the revolutionary government becomes a new ruling class more total than the old, because it claims to act in the people's name. I said this against Marx in the International, and I lived to see it. A society worth having cannot be handed down by a dictatorship; it must be built from below, by free federation of communes and associations, replacing the authority of the state with the voluntary coordination that nature and history show to be possible. You do not reach the abolition of authority by way of a stronger authority.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The state is not the eternal form of human society, nor a neutral tool that good hands may turn to good ends.","n":[]},{"t":"It is a definite historical growth, born in the sixteenth century out of the alliance of the military chief, the judge, the priest, and later the capitalist, and it grew precisely by destroying the free cities, the guilds, the village communes — the whole dense fabric of mutual aid and self-government that men had built from below.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"Its essential function is not the common good but domination: concentrating power and wealth and defending them.","n":[]},{"t":"From this the cardinal error of the state socialists follows plainly.","n":[]},{"t":"They propose to capture the state, to seize its machinery and wield it for the workers, confident that it will afterward wither away.","n":[]},{"t":"It will not wither.","n":[]},{"t":"Power concentrated does not dissolve itself; the men who hold it acquire interests in holding it, a bureaucracy forms around it, and the revolutionary government becomes a new ruling class more total than the old, because it claims to act in the people's name.","n":[]}],[{"t":"I said this against Marx in the International, and I lived to see it.","n":[]},{"t":"A society worth having cannot be handed down by a dictatorship; it must be built from below, by free federation of communes and associations, replacing the authority of the state with the voluntary coordination that nature and history show to be possible.","n":[2]},{"t":"You do not reach the abolition of authority by way of a stronger authority.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"The State: Its Historic Role (1897, on the state as the historical alliance of soldier, judge, and priest that destroyed the medieval free cities and communes); 'Law and Authority' (1886); Modern Science and Anarchism; the sustained critique of state socialism and of the Marxist doctrine of the conquest of state power and the dictatorship of the proletariat; the Memoirs and the late writings on the Russian Revolution. Reception: the Marxist-anarchist debate of the First International (Marx versus Bakunin) and after; the twentieth-century verdict of the Soviet experience on the 'withering away of the state'; the reading of Kropotkin as a prophet of the bureaucratic degeneration of the workers' state; contemporary libertarian-socialist and anarchist theory (Colin Ward, Murray Bookchin, James C. Scott).","works":["The State: Its Historic Role (1897, on the state as the historical alliance of soldier, judge, and priest that destroyed the medieval free cities and communes)","'Law and Authority' (1886)","Modern Science and Anarchism","the sustained critique of state socialism and of the Marxist doctrine of the conquest of state power and the dictatorship of the proletariat","the Memoirs and the late writings on the Russian Revolution"],"reception":"the Marxist-anarchist debate of the First International (Marx versus Bakunin) and after; the twentieth-century verdict of the Soviet experience on the 'withering away of the state'; the reading of Kropotkin as a prophet of the bureaucratic degeneration of the workers' state; contemporary libertarian-socialist and anarchist theory (Colin Ward, Murray Bookchin, James C. Scott).","status":"Kropotkin's critique of the state and of Marxist state-socialism is his most historically vindicated political claim. The anarchist wing of the First International (Bakunin, then Kropotkin) warned that the Marxist conquest of state power would produce not the withering-away of the state but a new despotism of officials — a warning the trajectory of the Soviet Union is widely taken to confirm. Kropotkin's own last years, in opposition to the Bolshevik dictatorship and the Red Terror, dramatize the prophecy. The position anchors the libertarian- socialist and anarchist traditions (Colin Ward's practical anarchism, Murray Bookchin's libertarian municipalism, James C. Scott's critique of the high-modernist state) and remains the central fault line between anarchism and Marxism.","era":"1842-1921","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The State, Its Historic Role","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In the sixteenth century, the long work of the two conspirator* ia already in full force. A king already rules over the barons, his rivals, and that force will alight on the free cities to crush them in their turn. Besides, the towns of the sixteenth century were not what they were in the twelfth, thirteenth or fourteenth centuries. They were born out of a libertarian revolution.","label":"The State, Its Historic Role"},{"n":2,"work":"The State, Its Historic Role","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"TKt State: Itt Historic M'U. We see in it an institution developed in the history of human socie- ties to hinder union among men,,f local initiative, to crush existing liberties and; ration. Arid we kno~w that an institution, which has a whole past dating some thousands of years back, cannot lend itself to a function opposed to the one for which it was developed in the course of history.","label":"The State, Its Historic Role"},{"n":3,"work":"Anarchism, Its Philosophy and Ideal","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Is it less true for that? And shall we allow our belief in the State to survive the host of prejudices we have already sacrificed for our eman ciption? It is not my intention to criticise to-night the State. That has been done and redone so often, and I am obliged to put off to another lecture the analysis of the historical part played by the State. A few general remarks will suffice.","label":"Anarchism, Its Philosophy and Ideal"},{"n":4,"work":"The State, Its Historic Role","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It is therefore of consequence, after having so often criticised the pre- sent State, to seek the cause- of its appearance, to investigate the part played by it in the past, to compare it with the institutions which it superseded. Let us first agree as to what we mean by the word State. There is, as you know, the German school that likes to confuse the State with Society.","label":"The State, Its Historic Role"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"mutual-aid-as-a-factor-of-evolution","label":"Mutual aid as a factor of evolution: is cooperation, as much as competition, a law of nature and the deeper engine of progress?"},{"slug":"anarchist-communism","label":"Anarchist communism: should distribution be according to need rather than according to labour contribution, abolishing the wage system entirely?"},{"slug":"human-nature-and-the-feasibility-of-anarchy","label":"Human nature and the feasibility of anarchy: is a stateless society of voluntary cooperation realistic, or does it rest on a naively optimistic view of human beings?"},{"slug":"ethics-without-command","label":"Ethics without command: can morality be grounded in the natural sentiment of mutual aid, without God, the state, or a social contract?"}]}