The Age of Consent. George Monbiot
it is hard to see how the people of anarchist communities could survive when thrust into conflict or competition with a neighbouring state, which – by definition – would possess the wherewithal to raise an army. It is just as difficult to see how they could defend themselves from the robber barons arising within their own territories, who would perceive this collapse not as an opportunity to embrace their fellow humans in the spirit of love and reconciliation, but as an opportunity to embrace their undefended resources.
It is impossible to read any history, ancient or modern, without acquiring the unhappy intelligence that Homo sapiens is a species with an extraordinary capacity for violence and destruction, and that this capacity has been exercised in most epochs in all regions of the world. Those who wish to exert power over other people or to seize their resources appear to use violence as either a first or a last resort, unless this tendency is checked by some other force, principally the fear of punishment by people with greater means of violence at their disposal. Any political system which seeks to enhance human welfare must provide the means of containing and preventing the aggression with which some people would greet others.
The state claims to do so by asserting a monopoly of violence. By attesting that only the servants of the state are permitted to use violence against other people, and then only according to the rules the state lays down, it pretends to offer protection to its citizens both from external aggression and from people with violent tendencies within its own borders. In theory a democratic state is prevented, by accountability to its people, from the arbitrary use of that violent power against its own citizens. The notional safeguards against its use of violence towards the people of other nations are less clear-cut: indeed, this is among the global democratic deficits which this manifesto seeks to address.
In mature democracies, arbitrary violence by the state against its own people is fairly limited: the police sometimes beat up protesters and members of ethnic minorities and extort confessions from suspects by violent means, while the security services occasionally assassinate troublesome citizens. The anarchists would argue, with justice, that the relatively low frequency and low intensity of state violence in democratic nations reflects the fact that most citizens, most of the time, obey the state, whether they agree with its prescriptions or not. If people were more inclined to behave as they wished – in other words, if they were more free – they would be subject to a corresponding increase in state violence.
Nor will democratic states always succeed in protecting their own people from the violence of others. There is no shortage of recent examples of popular governments being deposed by external aggression. There are also plenty of instances of state authorities turning a blind eye while a faction with which they sympathize assaults a faction towards which they are antagonistic. Recent attacks on Muslims in India have been passively witnessed, and occasionally abetted, by police and soldiers. In Britain, as I know to my cost, the police often refuse to intervene when protesters are beaten up by private security guards.
But this system (with the significant caveat that it does not, as yet, prevent the state from attacking the people of other nations) does, at least, function in theory. It could be argued that both the state’s own arbitrary violence and its toleration of the violence of certain favoured citizens are the results of the failure of its people to hold the authorities sufficiently to account. It is possible to see how, in a mature democratic state, effective campaigning by the victims of violence or their supporters could be turned into such a public embarrassment and electoral liability that the government is forced to desist. Indeed, on many occasions, precisely this has happened. There can, or so we should be inclined to hope, never be another Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, or another sinking of a Rainbow Warrior by the French security services. Such restraint as democratic states display arises only from fear of losing public support, and therefore losing power.
No state but the dominant superpower can guarantee to defend its citizens from external aggression,* but the state does appear to be rather more capable of doing so – when it is responsive to the will of its people – than unaffiliated autonomous communities. Indeed, one of the reasons why both the Roman Empire and, 2000 years later, the British Empire, expanded so swiftly is that many of the tribes they attacked were either aggregated only loosely into states, or were not aggregated at all. Had there been no state of Nicaragua, the proxy warriors financed by the US could have overrun that region immediately, seizing the land and its resources from its people. The Sandinista government was far weaker than the United States, but, through ingenious organization, it succeeded in resisting the greater power for several years, during which it mustered the support both of other nations and of many people within the US. The eventual settlement was almost certainly less oppressive than it would have been, had the proxy warriors not encountered a regular army and the resistance and public relations coordinated by the state.
It is not clear, by contrast, that anarchism works even in theory. The problem with the model is that, for the reasons outlined above, it has either to be applied universally, or applied only in those regions which are so poor in resources that no one else would want to live there. In other words, if states continue to exist, they will seize from relatively defenceless peoples the assets which would be to their advantage. Anarchist communities which possess valuable resources can sometimes survive for short periods in accessible places, or for longer periods in remote and impassable regions. Their establishment has often been associated with emancipation and, within the community, redistribution. But these communities are always likely to be vulnerable to attack by those federations of people – which we call states – big enough to command armies and rich enough to deploy advanced military technology.
But let us suppose, as many anarchists do, that this system can, somehow, displace all states, simultaneously, worldwide. What we then discover is that this very universalism destroys the freedoms the anarchists wish to defend. Anarchists, like most people who support particular political systems, see those systems as responding to people rather like themselves. Most anarchists associate with oppressed communities, and envisage anarchism as the means by which the oppressed can free themselves from persecution. But if everyone is to be free from the coercive power of the state, then this must apply to the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The richest and most powerful communities on earth – be they geographical communities or communities of interest – will be as unrestrained by external forces as the poorest and weakest.
This is why, though both sides would furiously deny it, the outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied universally, is identical. The anarchists associate with the oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors, but by eliminating the state (as some, but by no means all the market fundamentalists wish to do), both simply remove such restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. This, of course, is the point of market fundamentalism. But it is also the inevitable result of anarchism. If you have difficulty envisaging this, simply picture an autonomous community of impoverished black people living next to an autonomous community of well-armed white racists. For the majority of humankind to be free, we must restrain the freedom of those who would oppress us.
So the anarchists would have us make another extraordinary leap of faith. Having caused the state magically to evaporate everywhere, they also insist, without providing a convincing explanation of how this might happen in the absence of the state, that we can eliminate those disparities of wealth and power between communities which would permit one group of people to oppress another. But even that would prove inadequate. Even if every community had equal access to resources, there is nothing in the anarchist system to prevent one group from seeking to acquire more resources by invading another. Indeed, precisely this happens, almost continuously, among the nomadic tribes of that part of Africa where the borders of Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya meet. These are classic anarchist communities, with centuries of organizational experience, and far more sophisticated means of managing their resources and resolving disputes than the intentional communes of the West. They are forced into cooperation within the tribe by the erratic ecology of the lands they inhabit and their consequent