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Refutation of “The State is Counterrevolutionary” Video Series by Anark [video] [text]
Every power presupposes some form of human slavery, for the division of society into higher and lower classes is one of the first conditions of its existence. The separation of men into castes, orders and classes occurring in every power structure corresponds to an inner necessity for the separation of the possessors of privilege from the people.
This is the anarchist variation of class analysis, that, like Nietzche’s “new slavery”, proceeds from the superficial observation that certain sections of the population are oppressed whilst others are privileged with oppression. Without historical materialism, classes are forgotten, the nature of the state is unknown, and we are met with this childish argument:
The only conceivable counter-argument, that a benevolent leadership which does not act in their own self-interest may sit in the seats of power, neglects a simple reality: all humans die eventually. And once those benevolent dictators die, the reins will be handed back over to a new group of human beings, turning the state, on a long enough timeline, into a game of Russian Roulette with the future of the masses lying in the balance.
This passes as anarchist “theory”! With no attempt to grapple with Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, or any Marxist analysis of the class character of the state, it may be ignored, and these self-assuming superficial definitions of the state are proven by their very existence. Then the state is ruled by “good people” and “bad people”, this is its motive force (don’t laugh).
A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing has to be developed in order to subject some classes to the domination of others.
This is basically correct, but since Anark has no understanding of the class character of the state, does not even mean to address it, this “class” has no features other than its oppression, so that we may arrive at Bakunin’s nonsense of a “new proletariat” suppressed by the DOTP.[1]
The state is an apparatus for the suppression of one class by another, of, in orthodox, the suppression of the majority by the minority, for the reconciliation of irreconcilable contradictions, although in the national sense the proletarian state (which Lenin clarifies in this sense is no longer a state proper)[2] may through the masses suppress the bourgeoisie whose power is supported internationally, as seen from the counterrevolutionary movement against the Bolsheviks supported by the imperialist powers.
- ↑ ““Let us ask, if the proletariat is to be the ruling class, over whom is it to rule? In short, there will remain another proletariat which will be subdued to this new rule, to this new state””
Mikhail Bakunin (1873). Statism and Anarchy. - ↑ ““The Commune was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word’—this is the most theoretically important statement Engels makes... The Commune was ceasing to be a state since it had to suppress, not the majority of the population, but a minority (the exploiters). It had smashed the bourgeois state machine. In place of a special coercive force the population itself came on the scene. All this was a departure from the state in the proper sense of the word””
Vladimir Lenin (1917). The State and Revolution: 'Supplementary Explanations by Engels; Letter to Bebel' (p. 46). [PDF]