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]
- ↑ ““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.