War

The general logic of anarchism is pacifist, though not all anarchists are pacifist. As an “ism” anarchism provides a vision of how things should be. As a vision of how things ought to be, anarchism is obviously pacifist.

On the other hand, the anarchist critique claims that war and the nation-state go hand in hand. As Randolph Bourne once wrote, “war is the health of the state.” To some, this statement might sound counter intuitive. Most of us learn from a very early age that the state saves us from violence. In our “state of nature,” the story tells us, individuals compete with one another over scarce resources creating a “war of all against all.” So to protect themselves, people formed a contract and surrendered their violence to the state. So the state saves people from their natural state of war, and is about peace making not war making. In Christian terms, this story is a “salvation story” (it is soteriological).

This story, however, does not not withstand historical research. First, anthropologists have found little evidence of warfare amongst primitive tribes. Historian Arther Ferrill, in his book, The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great, shows that the development of settled semi-urban towns in the Neolithic Age went hand-in-hand with the development of warfare, stating that there is “little evidence from all but late Palaeolithic sites of anything that can be called organized warfare.” This does not mean that people did not sometimes murder or assault other people, only that organized warfare began with agriculture and civilization. So any anarchist critique of warfare must take into account studies such as Ferrill’s that point to the connection between civilized, settled life and warfare. As cities grow, they denude the landscape of the resources they need to survive and must rely on conquest and trade to survive as a civilization. While trade is the less violent of the two means, it is unstable, and if a trade partner cannot or refuses to continue trading the goods needed for the civilization to survive, that civilization has no choice but to resort to warfare.

Second, although warfare is deeply embedded in western civilization, the modern state has intensified warfare beyond anything previously experienced. It comes as a shock to some that states, as we know them, arose only a few hundred years ago and nation-states much later than that. Historian and sociologist Charles Tilly has shown the interlinking between the rise of the modern state and warfare. State making depended upon the ability of the elites to make war and to extract labor and taxes from the population. This all took a rise in bureaucracy to make sure a resistant population submitted. One of the ways this occurred was through a process of urbanization: moving subsistence farmers off the land and into the cities where they became dependent upon a money economy and were effectively enslaved to the new moneyed system, which fueled the elites’ expansion of their kingdoms through warfare and conquest. Thus from the very start, the work of Charles Tilly shows, the modern state represented not a social contract for peacemaking, but a tool for elite interests and war making.

Thus it is not surprising that anarchism as an organized political option began to rise up around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when the process of state making grew exponentially and became “nation-state” making. Anarchism opposes not just states, but their war making apparatus, including standing armies, weapon technologies, bureaucracy, the police and the taxation system that fuels it.