Statism Kritik

STATISM KRITIK CONTENTS
Shell--------------------------------------------------------------------------1-3
Hierarchy Is Hypocritical-------------------------------------------------4
Hierarchy Mechanizes-----------------------------------------------------5
Classism /Division of Labor Bad----------------------------------------6
Capitalism Is As Bad As Feudalism /Monarchy---------------------7
Hierarchy Hurts Workers------------------------------------------------8
Governments Exploit------------------------------------------------------9-11
Governments Kill Liberty------------------------------------------------12-13
Governments Kill Humanity---------------------------------------------14-16
Governments Kill Equality-----------------------------------------------17
Governments Cause Crime-----------------------------------------------18-19
Capitalism Causes Nuclear Extermination----------------------------20
Hierarchy Kills Nature-----------------------------------------------------21-22
AT: Anarchy Would Harm the Wealthy-------------------------------23
Governments Don’t Represent the People------------------------------24
AT: Humans Are Naturally Competitive /No Cooperation---------25-26
AT: We Can Reform the System-----------------------------------------27-28
AT: Some Are Oppressed For the Good of the Whole---------------29
AT: Anarchy Oppresses the Rich----------------------------------------30
Hierarchy-Free Society Saves Nature-----------------------------------31
Anarchy Gives “Plenty For All”------------------------------------------32-33
Anarchy Frees----------------------------------------------------------------34-35
Anarchy Solves For Crime-------------------------------------------------36
AT: Can’t Reject Capitalism-----------------------------------------------37
Anarchy Solves For War----------------------------------------------------38
AT: Governments Would Take Over Communes---------------------39
AT: Anarchy Promotes Chaotic Individualism------------------------40
AT: No Incentive To Work In Anarchy---------------------------------41-42
Anarchy Is Better Than Authoritarianism------------------------------43
Representative Democracy Is Oppressive-------------------------------44
AT: Permutation--------------------------------------------------------------45
AT: Anarchy Would Lead To Primitivism------------------------------46-47
Laws Are Bad------------------------------------------------------------------48
AT: Anarchy Won’t Work With A Large Population-----------------49
Everything Must Be Deprivatized------------------------------------------50
AT: Unfair To Reward Skilled and Unskilled Labor Equally--------51
Wage System Will Fall With Capitalism----------------------------------52
AT: Anarchy Is Utopian---------------------------------------------------- 53-54
AT: Cards Are Too Old------------------------------------------------------55
Must act against Government-----------------------------------------------56
THESIS
The file says that the plan goes through the federal government, which enforces the
hierarchy. This is bad because having the government act and pass laws kills liberty,
humanity, and eventually nature. Know the sources well, because very likely, someone
might get into a citation debate with you. The link inserts for the second link point are on
pages 9-29, and 31. These are all good inserts, but I would suggest the ones pertaining to
the environment and nature, because they are closest to the topic. This is a good K if you
know how to run it. Be careful because it is susceptible to counter-kritik.
Have fun, good debating!
Shell
A) Framework: GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIAL LIBERTY WOULD

TRANSCEND OUR CURRENT CAPITALIST SLAVERY.
Bakunin, Mikhail, a labor organizer, 1870, The Commune, the Church, and the State,
(Bakunin’s Writings, 1947)
I am a passionate seeker for truth and just as strong an opponent of the corrupting lies,
through which the party of order – this privileged, official, and interested representative
of all religions, philosophical political, legal economical, and social outrage in the past
and present – has tried to keep the world in ignorance. I love freedom with all my heart.
It is the only condition under which the intelligence, the manliness, and happiness of the
people, can develop and expand. By freedom, however, I naturally understand not its
mere form, forced down as from above, measured and controlled by the state, this
eternal lie which in reality, is nothing but the privilege of the few founded upon the
slavery of all. Nor do I mean that "individualistic," selfish, petty, and mock freedom,
which is propagated by J.J. Rousseau and all other schools of bourgeois liberalism. The
mock freedom which is limited by the supposed right of all, and defended by the state,
and leads inevitably to the destruction of the rights of the individual. No: I mean the
only true freedom, that worthy of the name; the liberty which consists therein for
everyone to develop all the material, intellectual, and moral faculties which lie dormant
in him; the liberty which knows and recognizes no limitations beyond those which
nature decrees. In this sense, there are no limitations, for the laws of our own nature are
not forced upon us by a law-giver who, beside or above us, sits on a throne.
B) Links
1) The affirmative plan works through the federal government, a structure of social
control.
2) [insert specific link]
C) Implications:
1) STATISM LEADS TO MECHANIZATION AND THE DEATH OF LIBERTY,
BEAUTY, AND SCIENCE.
Goldman 1940, Emma, a journalist, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.40
Real wealth consists in things of utility and beauty, in things that help to create strong,
beautiful bodies, and surroundings inspiring to live in. But if man is doomed to wind
cotton around a spool, or dig coal, or build roads for thirty years of his life, there can be
no talk of wealth. What he gives to the world are only gray and hideous things, reflecting
a dull and hideous existence – too weak to live, too cowardly to die. Strange to say,
there are people who extol this deadening method of centralized production as the
proudest achievement of our age. They fail utterly to realize that if we are to continue in
machine subserviency, our slavery is more complete than was our bondage to the king.
They do not want to know that centralization is not only the deathknell of liberty, but
also of health and beauty, of art and science, all these being impossible in a clocklike,
mechanical atmosphere.
2
Shell
2) HIERARCHICAL SOCIETY DEVOURS NATURE LIKE AN UNTREATED

DISEASE.
Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1990, Remaking Society, p.15
Finally, liberal environmentalism suffers from a consistent refusal to see that a capitalistic
society based on competition and growth for its own sake must ultimately devour the
natural world, just like an untreated cancer must ultimately devour its host. Personal
intentions, be they good or bad, have little to do with this unrelenting process. An
economy that is structured around the maxim, “Grow or Die,” must necessarily pit itself
against the natural world and leave ecological ruin in its wake as it works its way
through the biosphere.
3) GOVERNMENT-BASED SOCIETY EXPLOITS AND DEGRADES THE POOR

– WE NEED A COMPLETELY NEW SYSTEM.
Kropotkin, Peter, editor of Le Revolt, 1880, The Spirit of Revolt (within Le Revolt)
Those who long for the triumph of justice, those who would put new ideas into practice,
are soon forced to recognize that the realization of their generous, humanitarian, and
regenerating ideas cannot take place in a society thus constituted; they perceive the
necessity of a revolutionary whirlwind which will sweep away all this rottenness,
revive sluggish hearts with its breath, and bring to mankind that spirit of devotion, self-
denial, and heroism, without which society sinks through degradation and vileness into
complete disintegration. In periods of frenzied haste toward wealth, of feverish
speculation and of crisis, of the sudden downfall of great industries and the ephemeral
expansion of other branches of production, of scandalous fortunes amassed in a few years
and dissipated as quickly, it becomes evident that the economic institutions which control
production and exchange are far from giving to society the prosperity which they are
supposed to guarantee; they produce precisely the opposite result. Instead of order they
bring forth chaos; instead of prosperity, poverty and insecurity; instead of reconciled
interests, war; a perpetual war of the exploiter against the worker, of exploiters and of
workers among themselves.
4) GOVERNMENTS ARE INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE AND CAUSE CRIME.

Goldman, Emma, 1940, Anarchism (1970), p.43
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside
from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and
natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital
punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed
utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.
3
Shell
5) CAPITALISM AND GOVERNMENTS LEGITIMIZE EVIL AND

IMPOVERISHMENT.
Einstein, Albert, 1949 (Staff Writer), Monthly Review, New York
The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real
source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers, the members of
which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor
– not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In
this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production – that is to say, the
entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as
additional capital goods – may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property
of individuals.
4
Hierarchy Is Hypocritical
— HIERARCHY IS HYPOCRITICAL AND DOOMED TO EXTINCTION.

Kropotkin, Peter, 1906, The Conquest of Bread (Elephant Edition, 1990), p.33
The system under which we live checks in its turn the growth of the social sentiment. We
all know that without uprightness, without self-respect, without sympathy, and mutual
aid, human kind must perish, as perish the few races of animals living by rapine, or the
slave-keeping ants. But such ideas are not to the taste of the ruling classes, and they have
elaborated a whole system of pseudo-science to teach the contrary.
Fine sermons have been preached on the text that those who have should share with those
who have not, but he who would carry out this principle would be speedily informed that
these beautiful sentiments are all very well in poetry, but not in practice. “To lie is to
degrade and besmirch oneself,” we say, and yet all civilized life becomes one huge lie.
We accustom ourselves and our children to hypocrisy, to the practice of a double-faced
morality. And since the brain is ill at ease among lies, we cheat ourselves with sophistry.
Hypocrisy and sophistry become the second nature of the civilized man.
But a society cannot live thus; it must return to truth, or cease to exist.
5
Hierarchy Mechanizes
— CAPITALISM FORCES WORKERS INTO A REPULSIVE AND

MECHANIZED EXISTENCE..
Marx and Engels, Karl and Friedrich , 1848, The Communist Manifesto
Owing to the extensive use of machinery and to division of labor, the work of the
proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the
workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple,
most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him. Hence, the cost
of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that
he requires for his maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a
commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion,
therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases.
— CAPITALISM MECHANIZES HUMANS.

Goldmann, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State
One of the insane characteristics of this struggle is the complete negation of the relation
of the producer to the things he produces. The average worker has no inner point of
contact with the industry he is employed in, and he is a stranger to the process of
production of which he is a mechanical part. Like any other cog of the machine, he is
replaceable at any time by other similar depersonalized human beings.
— HIERARCHY MECHANIZES AND IMPRISONS SOCIETY.

Goldman, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State
The strongest bulwark of authority is uniformity; the least divergence from it is the
greatest crime. The wholesale mechanization of modern life has increased uniformity
a thousandfold. It is everywhere present, in habits, tastes, dress, thoughts and ideas. Its
most concentrated dullness is "public opinion." Few have the courage to stand out against
it. He who refuses to submit is at once labeled "queer," "different," and decried as a
disturbing element in the comfortable stagnancy of modern life. ...
In pre-war time the individual could at least escape national and family boredom.. The
whole world was open to his longings and his quests. Now the world has become a
prison, and life continual solitary confinement.
6
Classism /Division of Labor Bad
— CLASS INEQUITIES OPPRESS THE MASSES, ROBBING THEM OF THE

ABILITY TO AVOID PAINFUL DRUDGERY.
In our civilized societies we are rich. Why then are the many poor? Why this painful
drudgery for the masses? Why, even to the best paid workman, this uncertainty for the
morrow, in the midst of all the wealth inherited from the past, and in spite of the powerful
means of production, which could ensure comfort to all, in return for a few hours of daily
toil?
The Socialists have said it and repeated it unwearingly. Daily they reiterate it,
demonstrating it by arguments taken from all the sciences. It is because all that is
necessary for production – the land, the mines, the highways, machinery, food, shelter,
education, knowledge – all have been seized by the few in the course of that long story of
robbery, enforced migration and wars, of ignorance and oppression, which has been the
life of the human race before it learned to subdue the forces of Nature. It is because,
taking advantage of alleged rights acquired in the past, these few appropriate today two
thirds of the products of human labor, and then squander them in the most shameful way.
— OPPRESSION OF THE MASSES WILL OCCUR SO LONG AS DIVISION OF

LABOR EXISTS.
We understand that all men have but one dream – that of emerging from, or enabling their
children to emerge from, this inferior state; to create for themselves an “independent”
position, which means what? To also live by other men’s work!
As long as there will be a class of manual workers and a class of “brain” workers, black
hands and white hands, it will be thus.
7
Capitalism Is As Bad As Feudalism /Monarchy
— CAPITALISM IS AS BARBARIC AS FEUDALISM.

We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless
he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We called those barbarous times. But if
the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced,
under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he
can find no better conditions. Everything has become private property, and he must
accept, or die of hunger.
The result of this state of things is that all our production tends in a wrong direction.
Enterprise takes no thought for the needs of the community. Its only aim is to increase the
gains of the speculator. Hence the constant fluctuations of trade, the periodical industrial
crises, each of which throws scores of thousands of workers on the streets.
— DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS ARE JUST AS OPPRESSIVE AS ANY

MONARCHY.
Bakunin, Mikhail, 1870, Statism and Anarchy
The essential difference between a monarchy and a democratic republic is reduced to the
following: In a monarchy, the bureaucratic world oppresses and plunders the people for
the greater benefit of the privileged propertied classes as well as for its own benefit, and
all that is done in the name of the monarch; in a republic, the same bureaucracy does
exactly the same thing, but in the name of the will of the people.
8
Hierarchy Hurts Workers
— CAPITALISM NEVER HELPS WORKERS – IT LEADS TO SEXISM,

RACISM, AND EXPLOITATION.
MacSimóin, Alan, a mine labor reformer, 1993, Workers’ Solidarity, No.38
Anyone who talks about 'social partnership', about labor and capital working together for
the benefit of all is talking nonsense. What rights we have and gains we have made have
been the result of long and often bitter struggles. The bosses only give such rights and
concessions as they are forced to. In times of recession, such as now, they try to make
workers pay through job losses, cuts in real wages, cuts in public spending, productivity
deals, etc. for the crisis that is a periodic and inevitable product of capitalism.
Although capitalism oppresses people on many different levels, race and sex to name but
two; it is the exploitation of our labor that is fundamental to the system. It is on this front
that the fight for a new society will be won or lost. If we can reclaim that aspect of our
lives, the system can be overturned and replaced with something much better.
— THE WAGE SYSTEM DENIES WORKERS THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE.

We must offer to the peasant in exchange for his toil not worthless paper-money, but the
manufactured articles of which he stands in immediate need. He lacks the proper
implements to till the land, clothes to protect him properly from the inclemencies of the
weather, lamps and oil to replace his miserable rushlight or tallow dip, spades, rakes,
ploughs. All these things, under present conditions, the peasant is forced to do without,
not because he does not feel the need for them, but because, in his life of struggle and
privation, a thousand useful things are beyond his reach; because he has no money to buy
them.
9
Governments Exploit
— GOVERNMENT IS THE “NEGATION OF HUMANITY” – THE OPPOSITE

OF FREEDOM AND JUSTICE AND THE CAUSE OF WAR.
Bakunin, Michael, 1870, The German Crisis
Whosoever mentions the State, implies force, oppression, exploitation, injustice – all
these brought together as a system are the main condition of present-day society. The
State has never had, and never can have, a morality. Its only morality and justice is its
own interest, its existence, and its omnipotence at any price; and before its interest, all
interest of humanity must stand in the back-ground. The State is the negation of
Humanity. It is this in two ways: the opposite of human freedom and human justice
(internally), as well as the forcible disruption of the common solidarity of mankind
(externally).The Universal State, repeatedly attempted, has always proved an
impossibility, so that as long as the State exists, States will exist and since every State
regards itself as absolute, and proclaims the adoration of its power as the highest law, to
which all other laws must be subordinated, it therefore follows that as long as States exist
wars cannot cease. Every State must conquer, or be conquered.
— CAPITALISM IS THE SOURCE OF ALL OF OUR SOCIAL EVILS AND

EXPLOITATION.
Indeed, capitalism completely incarnates Bakunin’s notion of “evil” without the

qualification that it is “socially necessary.” Beyond the capitalist system there are no
further “turning points in history.” Capitalism marks the end of the road for a long social
development in which evil permeated the good and irrationality permeated the rational.
Capitalism, in effect, constitutes the point of absolute negativity for society and the
natural world. One cannot improve this social order, reform it, or remake it on its own
terms with an ecological prefix such as “eco-capitalism.” The only choice one has is to
destroy it, for it embodies every social disease – from patriarchal values, class
exploitation, and statism to avarice, militarism, and now, growth for the sake of growth –
that has afflicted “civilization” and tainted all its great advances.
10
Governments Exploit
— GOVERNMENTS DO NOT FOSTER JUSTICE – THEY DEHUMANIZINGLY

COERCE.
Thoreau, Henry David, 1849, Civil Disobedience
It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only
obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right. It is truly
enough said, that a corporation has no conscience; but a corporation of conscientious men
is a corporation with a conscience. Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means
of their respect to it, even the well-disposed are daily made agents of injustice. A
common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of
soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in
admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their
common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and
produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in
which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at
all? Or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in
power.
11
Governments Exploit/Coerce
— GOVERNMENTS CANNOT AVOID POVERTY AND EXPLOITATION.

Poverty, we have said elsewhere, was the primary cause of wealth. It was poverty that
created the first capitalist; because, before accumulating “surplus value”, of which we
hear so much, men had to be sufficiently destitute to consent to sell their labour, so as
not to die of hunger. It was poverty that made capitalists. And if the number of then poor
increased so rapidly during the Middle Ages, it was due to the invasions and wars that
followed the founding of States, and to the increase of riches resulting from the
exploitation of the East. These two causes tore asunder the bonds that kept men
together in the agrarian and urban communities, and taught them to proclaim the principle
of wages, so dear to the exploiters, instead of the solidarity they formerly practised in
their tribal life.
— GOVERNMENTS COERCE AND DOMINATE, DESTROYING SOCIETY.

Carter, April, a professor of political science, 1971, The Political Theory of Anarchism,
p.25
But for anarchists and many socialists, society becomes the opposite of the State. Society
is the repository of all the good aspects of social life and organization – co-operation,
sympathy, affection, initiative, and spontaneity, while the State incorporates all the bad
aspects of social interaction – coercion, force, and domination; and politics tends to be
seen as the arena of force, fraud, and trickery. The state is an incubus upon society – a
distorting factor.
— WE MUST NOT BE COERCED BY GOVERNMENTS – THEY DON’T WORK

FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE.
Thus the State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only
his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior
physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us
see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They can only force me who obey a
higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being
forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When
I meet a government which says to me, “Your money or your life,” why should I be in
haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot
help that. It must help itself; do as I do.
12
Governments Kill Liberty
— GOVERNMENTS ARE INHERENTLY VIOLENT AND OPPRESSING.

Bakunin, Michael, 1870, The German Crisis
To strive for international justice, liberty, and perpetual peace, and at the same time to
uphold the State, is contradictory and naive. It is impossible to alter the nature of the
State, because it is just this nature that constitutes the State; and States cannot change
their nature without ceasing to exist. It thus follows that there cannot be a good, just,
virtuous State. All States are bad in that sense, that they, by their nature, by their
principle, by their very foundation and the highest ideal of their existence, are the
opponents of human liberty, morality, and justice.
— ULTIMATE FREEDOM CAN BE ATTAINED ONLY WHEN THE STATE IS

DESTROYED.
Carter, April, a professor at Somerville, 1978, Nomos XIX: Anarchism, p.323
There are well-known difficulties in defining freedom, but it is reasonable to start from
the basic assumption that an individual’s freedom depends on the absence of immediate
and hurtful physical constraints and of extreme sanctions: an individual is freer out of jail
than in it, freer without the constant threat of arrest and torture, and freer if he is not in
fear for his life. Thus freedom in general increases the more the powers of violence
wielded by the state against the individual are restricted, and the more the use of these
powers is restricted. Anarchists, instead of looking to the rule of law to maximize
personal freedom, look to the total abolition of the organs of state violence.
— GOVERNMENTS UNNECESSARILY DESTROY LIBERTY AND FREEDOM.

Hocking, William, of Harvard, 1970, Anarchism, p.120
First of them is the restriction of liberty; and liberty, in the anarchist’s ideal, is the chief
of all political goods. If liberty is the chief political good, then no sacrifice of it for any
other good can be other than a bad bargain.
Society stands to lose by every diminution of general freedom; for it runs the risk of
checking its most original, and therefore most priceless, developments. Though not every
divergent genius is a prophet, the prophets are bound to be among the divergent and
intractable. Yet it is not in the name of the social welfare that the anarchist primarily
pleads his cause. It is in the name of the individual’s own destiny and right.
13
Governments Kill Liberty
— GOVERNMENT, OR A CONTROLLING SOCIAL STRUCTURE – IS THE

DEVIL OF HISTORY.
Bakunin, Mikhail, 1870, Protestation of the Alliance
The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether

bestial, and savage instinct. Under the influence of the mental development of man, it
takes on a somewhat more ideal form and becomes somewhat ennobled, presenting itself
as the instrument of reason and the devoted servant of that abstraction, or political fiction,
which is called the public good. But in its essence it remains just as baneful, and it
becomes even more so when, with the application of science, it extends its scope and
intensifies the power of its action. If there is a devil in history, it is this power principle.
— CAPITALISM TYRANNICALLY CONTROLS.

Chomsky, Noam, a linguist and policy analyst, 1995, interview with Kevin Doyle,
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html
What is called 'capitalism' is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge

and largely unaccountable private tyrannies exercising vast control over the economy,
political systems, and social and cultural life, operating in close co-operation with
powerful states that intervene massively in the domestic economy and international
society. That is dramatically true of the United States, contrary to much illusion. The rich
and privileged are no more willing to face market discipline than they have been in the
past, though they consider it just fine for the general population.
14
Governments Kill Humanity
— GOVERNMENTS MECHANIZE HUMANS, CAUSING EVIL.

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their
bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus,
etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral
sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden
men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no
more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only
as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others
– as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders – serve the state
chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as
likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God.
— TRULY HUMAN COMMUNITIES CANNOT DEVELOP UNDER

GOVERNMENTS.
Bakunin, Mikhail, Letters To A Frenchman
Collectivism can be imposed only upon slaves – and then collectivism becomes the
negation of humanity. Among a free people collectivism can come about only in the
natural course of things, by force of circumstances: not by imposing it from above, but by
a spontaneous movement from below, which springs forth freely and necessarily when
the conditions of privileged individualism – State politics, the codes of civil and criminal
law, the juridical family and inheritance rights – have been swept away by the
Revolution.
— GOVERNMENTS ARE HIDEOUS MONSTERS WHICH CONSUME

HUMANITY.
Goldman, Emma, 1940, The Individual, Society, and the State
Friedrich Nietzsche called the State a cold monster. What would he have called the
hideous beast in the garb of modern dictatorship? Not that government had ever allowed
much scope to the individual; but the champions of the new State ideology do not grant
even that much. "The individual is nothing," they declare, "it is the collectivity which
counts." Nothing less than the complete surrender of the individual will satisfy the
insatiable appetite of the new deity.
15
— CAPITALISM PRODUCES INNUMERABLE SOCIAL ILLS, THREATENING

HUMANITY.
Kothari, Rajni, of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, April 1997,
Alternatives, p.233
It is a model of global integration built on all-round splintering and polarizing,

producing destruction and annihilation not through wars and military machines but
through starvation, pestilence, crime, social erosion, and loneliness, growing trade in
juvenile and gender-based populations, drugs, violence, and free-trade in guns and
bombs, urban collapse and unexpected deaths caused by ever more hazardous industries
and energy use. Much of the price of all this is paid by the already unprotected, the
insecure and vulnerable, the poor, the minorities, the refugees, and the least secure of all,
women and children. If it is a global order that is being envisaged, it is a global order
built on the social erosion of diverse civil societies and shunting to the margins of
existence ideas of individual freedom and primary bonds, of the pride and dignity that
comes from belonging to a clan or a community, a caste or a tribal ancestry. This is what
capitalist development and the forced urbanization and migration and displacement that
are entailed in it will produce, indeed is producing.
— GOVERNMENTS ARE OPPOSED TO THE BASIC HUMAN VALUES.

Wolff, Robert Paul, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, 1970, In defense of
Anarchism
The defining mark of the state is authority, the right to rule. The primary obligation of
man is autonomy, the refusal to be ruled. It would seem, then, that there can be no
resolution of the conflict between the autonomy of the individual and the putative
authority of the state. Insofar as a man fulfills his obligation to make himself the authors
of his decisions, he will resist the state’s claim to have authority over him. That is to say,
he will deny that he has a duty to obey the laws of the state simply because they are the
laws. In that sense, it would seem that anarchism is the only political doctrine consistent
with the virtue of autonomy.
16
— THE INJUSTICE OF LAWS AND GOVERNMENT TURN OUR LIVES INTO

A DELUSIONAL HELL.
Thoreau, Henry David, 1854, Slavery In Massachuesetts
At last it occurred to me that what I had lost was a country. I had never respected the
government near to which I lived, but I had foolishly thought that I might manage to live
here, minding my private affairs, and forget it. For my part, my old and worthiest pursuits
have lost I cannot say how much of their attraction, and I feel that my investment in life
here is worth many per cent less since Massachusetts last deliberately sent back an
innocent man, Anthony Burns, to slavery. I dwelt before, perhaps, in the illusion that my
life passed somewhere only between heaven and hell, but now I cannot persuade myself
that I do not dwell wholly within hell. The site of that political organization called
Massachusetts is to me morally covered with volcanic scoriae and cinders, such as Milton
describes in the infernal regions. If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers,
and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it. ...
I feel that, to some extent, the State has fatally interfered with my lawful business. It has
not only interrupted me in my passage through Court Street on errands of trade, but it has
interrupted me and every man on his onward and upward path, on which he had trusted
soon to leave Court Street far behind. What right had it to remind me of Court Street? I
have found that hollow which even I had relied on for solid.
17
Governments Kill Equality
— GOVERNMENTS DESTROY EQUALITY WITH BRUTAL DOMINATION.

Bakunin, Mikhail, 1870, World Revolutionary Alliance of Social Democracy
Equality of political rights, or a democratic State, constitute in themselves the most

glaring contradiction in terms. The State, or political right, denotes force, authority,
predominance; it presupposes inequality in fact. Where all rule, there are no more
ruled, and there is no State.
18
Governments Cause Crime
— GOVERNMENT-CAUSED SOCIAL HIERARCHY LEADS TO CRIME.

Crime is naught but misdirected energy. So long as every institution of today, economic,
political, social, and moral, conspires to misdirect human energy into wrong channels; so
long as most people are out of place doing the things they hate to do, living a life they
loathe to live, crime will be inevitable, and all the laws on the statutes can only increase,
but never do away with crime. What does society, as it exists today, know of the process
of despair, the poverty, the horrors, the fearful struggle the human soul must pass on
its way to crime and degradation?
— GOVERNMENTS ARE THE CAUSE OF CRIME.

Hocking, William, of Harvard, 1970, Anarchism, p.121
For however worthy of obedience the law may be, governments, seduced by force-using,
seldom are; and the disaffection from rulers extends to the law behind them. There is an
element of arrogance in their wielding of principles more sacred than themselves; and if
they insist on being inseparable from the law, the resentment due to them will not be
withheld because it strikes the law also. Law which allies itself with force begets
lawlessness.
19
Governments Cause Crime
— GOVERNMENT ACTION CREATES COMPLETE DEPENDENCY.

Taylor, Michael, a professor at the University of Washington, 1987, The Possibility of
Cooperation, p.168
Men who live for long under government and its bureaucracy, courts, and police, come to
rely upon them. They find it easier to use the state for the settlement of their disputes and
for the provision of public goods, instead of arranging these things for themselves, even
where the disputes and the publics for which the goods are to be provided, are quite local.
In this way, the state mediates between individuals; they come to deal with each other
through the courts, through the tax collector, and the bureaucracies which spend the
taxes.
20
Capitalism Causes Nuclear Extermination
— CAPITALISM CAUSES WARS AND RISKS NUCLEAR EXTERMINATION.

Leight, Samuel, a professor at the University of Arizona, 1984, The Futility of
Reformism, p.31
Second, the cause of war is inherent in capitalism – this is a chronic condition that is both
irremovable and incurable as long as the system survives. Given a society organized as a
gigantic market place, wars will continue to be fought over private property and related
issues when diplomacy and negotiations fail. The big question is: will the “small” wars
continue on daily basis, as they have for decades, or will they be interrupted by a
worldwide nuclear disaster?
21
Hierarchy Kills Nature
— HIERARCHY RISKS ECOLOGICAL EXTINCTIONS.

Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1994, Reflecting On Nature (ed. Gruen
and Jamieson), p.123
Our present society has a definite hierarchical character. It is a propertied society that
concentrates economic power in corporate elites. It is a bureaucratic and militaristic
society that concentrates political and military power in centralized state institutions. It is
a patriarchal society that allocates authority to men in varying degrees. And it is a racist
society that places a minority of whites in a self-deceptive sovereignty over a vast
worldwide majority of peoples of color. While it is theoretically possible that a
hierarchical society can biologically sustain itself, at least for a time, through draconian
environmentalist controls, it is absolutely inconceivable that present-day hierarchical
and particularly capitalist society could establish a non-domineering and ethnically
symbiotic relationship between itself and the natural world. As long as hierarchy persists,
as long as domination organizes humanity around a system of elites, the project of
dominating nature will remain a predominant ideology and inevitably lead our planet to
the brink, if not into the abyss, of ecological extinction.
— HIERARCHY IS INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE TO ALL LIFE.

Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1994, Reflecting On Nature (ed. Gruen
and Jamieson), p.124
Capitalist society, whether in Western corporate or Eastern bureaucratic forms, is

fundamentally destructive. The power of this society to destroy has reached a scale
unprecedented in the history of humanity – and this power is being used, almost
systematically, to wreak havoc upon the entire world of life and its material bases. In
nearly every region, air is being befouled, waterways polluted, soil washed away, the
land desiccated, and wildlife destroyed. Coastal areas and even the depths of the sea are
not immune to widespread pollution. More significantly in the long run, basic biological
cycles such as the carbon cycle and nitrogen cycle, upon which all living things depend
for the maintenance and renewal of life, are being distorted to the point of irreversible
damage.
22
Hierarchy Kills Nature
— THE CAPITALIST-BASED ECOLOGICAL CRISIS THREATENS SURVIVAL.

The Monthly Review, November 1997, Joel Kovel, p.6
The ecological crisis is defined by the brutal fact that the normal course of social production inexorably
destroys the natural basis of society. Until as recently as the 1960s nature was able to buffer the effects of
production. Now this function is breaking down in a proliferating and incalculable way across multiple
ecosystems. Climate change, species loss, disease, depletion of soils and groundwater, intoxication by
pollutants... the list can be extended, but its message is clear and harrowing: survival depends upon
coming to grips with what is wrong at the mainspring of our civilization.
— CAPITALISM KILLS BEAUTY, THE EXISTENCE OF NATURE, AND THE

HUMAN SPECIES.
Wherever capital has its way, the ecological principles that underlie the emergence and
flowering of life, beauty, and consciousness are broken down through the intrusion of
the commodity form. Quality is replaced by quantity; differentiation and balance are
replaced by brutal expansion; and the fruits of billions of years of evolution are
transformed into cash. And as ecosystem damage grows and interacts upon itself, the
survivability of the species is itself thrown into doubt.
— CAPITALISM DRIVES ALL FORCES WHICH DESTROY NATURE.

It is capital that conditions and drives separate determinations in an ecologically

destructive way, and so becomes the efficient cause of the crisis. Development or
industrialization, as such, is an empty construct. But development or industrialization
under capitalist aegis, in which capitalist corporations, markets, lifestyles, even
psychologies and character structure, all interact, is what destabilizes ecosystems all
over the planet.
— OPPRESSION OF HUMANS MUST CEASE BEFORE WE CAN STOP

OPPRESSION OF NATURE.
Whatever has turned human beings into “aliens” in nature are social changes that have
made many human beings “aliens” in their own social world: the domination of the
young by the old, of women by men, and of men by men. Today, as for many centuries in
the past, there are still oppressive human beings who literally own society and others who
are owned by it. Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its
collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific
knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all
ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.
23
AT: Anarchy Would Harm the Wealthy
1) Extend- Bakunin in 1870: Government-free society would help everyone.
2) CLASSISM CRIPPLES BOTH THE RICH AND THE POOR.

We know the consequences of the division of labour full well. It is evident that, first of
all, we are divided into two classes: on the one hand, producers, who consume very little
and are exempt from thinking because they only do physical work, and who work badly
because their brains remain inactive; and on the other hand, the consumers, who,
producing little or hardly anything, have the privilege of thinking for the others, and who
think badly because the whole world of those who toil with their hands is unknown to
them.
3) We must not allow a minority of the people to benefit from the suffering of the
majority.
4) Today’s upper-class could continue to live excellent lives – they would just have to
work for it, rather than exploiting the labor of others.
24
Governments Don’t Represent the People
— GOVERNMENTS FAIL TO REPRESENT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE.

I heartily accept the motto, – “That government is best which governs least;” and I should
like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts
to this, which also I believe, – “That government is best which governs not at all;” and
when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.
Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all
governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought
against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also
be brought up against a standing government. The government itself, which is only the
mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused
and perverted before the people can act through it.
— GOVERNMENTS OPPRESSIVELY IGNORE THE NEEDS OF SOCIETY.

Hoffman, Robert, a professor of history, 1970, Anarchism, p.8
The reasons for this conviction are many; most are summed up in the notion that the
State, no matter how constituted, is alien from most or all of the society it governs. It can
not be the embodiment of the citizenry, but is instead an institution with needs, views,
and the goals peculiar to itself. Rather than expressing and enacting the needs and wishes
of society’s members, the State has a life of its own, and serves society as it sees,
imposing its will on a largely helpless and often resentful population, and prevailing
over it only through compulsion.
A FREE SOCIETY CAN ONLY BE CONSTRUCTED FROM THE BOTTOM UP.

Bakunin, Michael, The Commune, the Church, and the State
he organization of the society of the future must and can be accomplished only from the
bottom upwards, through the free federation and union of the workers into groups,
unions, and societies, which will unite again into districts, communes, national
communes, and finally form a great international federation. Only thus can be evolved
the true vital order of liberty and happiness for all, the order which is not opposed to
the interests of the individual or of society, but on the contrary strengthens the same and
brings them into harmony.
25
AT: Humans Are Naturally Competitive /No Cooperation
1) THE IDEA THAT IT IS HUMAN NATURE TO STRIVE FOR POWER IS

FLAWED AND SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED.
Dixon, Keith, of Simon Fraser University, 1986, Freedom and Equality, p.72
What most of us take to be “natural”, “ain’t necessarily so!” We may feel that incentives
and rewards are necessary to sustain an efficient level of work; that men will necessarily
strive for power and status and that human wants are limitless. But these assumptions
may be socially derived. Were we to live in a culture where cooperation and not
competition were the norm our conception of human nature might be fundamentally
different.
2) People compete now because they have been taught to do so. The new society
would teach different ideals.
3) HUMANS COOPERATE TODAY WITHOUT GOVERNMENT

INTERVENTION.
Accustomed as we are by hereditary prejudices and our unsound education and training
to represent ourselves the beneficial hand of Government, legislation and magistracy
everywhere, we have come to believe that man would tear his fellow-man to pieces like a
wild beast the day the police took his eye off him; that absolute chaos would come about
if authority were overthrown during a revolution. And with our eyes shut we pass by
thousands and thousands of human groupings which form themselves freely, without any
intervention of the law, and attain results infinitely superior to those achieved under
governmental tutelage.
4) This is an utterly pessimistic view of humanity. If you believe that people can
never work together, there’s no reason for wanting to live.
26
AT: Humans Are Naturally Competitive /No Cooperation
5) COMMUNALISM WORKED UNTIL IT WAS CRUSHED BY THE

INEQUITIES OF GOVERNMENTS.
One of the current objections to Communism and Socialism altogether, is that the idea is
so old, and yet it has never been realized. Schemes of ideal States haunted the thinkers of
Ancient Greece; later on, the early Christians joined in communist groups; centuries later,
large communist brotherhoods came into existence during the Reform movement. ...
At first sight, this objection seems very serious. However, the moment we consider
human history more attentively, it loses its strength. We see, first, that hundreds of
millions of men have succeeded in maintaining amongst themselves, in their village
communities, for many hundreds of years, one of the main elements of Socialism – the
common ownership of the chief instrument of production, the land, and the appointment
of the same according to the labor capacities of the different families; and we learn that if
the communal possession of the land has been destroyed in Western Europe, it was not
from within, but from without, by the governments which created a land monopoly in
favor of the nobility and the middle classes.
6) The affirmative team insists that cooperation is impossible, yet you can see
multiple examples of it in this debate round. All four debaters have agreed to work
alongside their partners and you have agreed to judge the round.
27
AT: We Can Reform the System
1) CAPITALISM CAUSES MERE REFORMS TO INTENSIFY PROBLEMS AND

CREATE DICTATORSHIPS.
Reformism, p.6
Reforms never live up to their expectations because the very nature of capitalism
invariably sabotages the performance of the reformers. Even when certain problems get
resolved they are replaced with new ones, generally of an equal or greater magnitude.
Apart from the wasted energy and time that reformism engenders, the danger of such
activity lies in the inevitable apathy and disillusionment that arises in the aftermath.
These are the breeding grounds for dictatorial regimes.
2) Extend- Kropotkin in 1880: Hierarchy is inherently destructive. We need a

completely new system.
3) IT’S COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO DEMAND REFORM FROM THE

GOVERNMENT – INDIVIDUALS MUST ACT AGAINST OPPRESSION.
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.
The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are
most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a
government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most
conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some
are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the
President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves, – the union between themselves and
the state, – and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?
4) CAPITALISM DESTABILIZES NATURE IN WAYS THAT CANNOT BE

CURED BY MERE REFORMS.
So long as the money nexus is the expression of capital, the actual, concrete limits of
nature will continue to be brushed aside. For as long as capitalism endures, it tends to
reign; and as long as it reigns it extends itself, and as long as it extends itself it tends to
destabilize ecologies by degrading the conditions of production in the hunt for surplus
value. Thus the regime of capital leads inexorably to an ecological crisis that cannot be
resolved within the terms of capital.
5) Reform-based policy has been tried since the birth of hierarchy and hasn’t
worked yet. We have to try something new.
28
AT: We Can Reform the System
6) WE MUST HAVE COMMUNAL LIVING NOW – MERE REFORMS ONLY

HINDERS THE PROCESS.
Reformism, p.3
The deluge of propaganda surrounding the reformist administration of capitalism

produces the distractions, confusions and purposeful misrepresentations that have so
drastically hampered the presentation of the socialist case. We are always being advised
that socialism is for the distant future and that “immediate” needs must receive attention.
Quite the contrary – the highest, most urgent, immediate need of the working class is the
establishment of socialism within the shortest possible time.
29
AT: Some Are Oppressed For the Good of the Whole
1) ANY GOVERNMENT OPPRESSION IS WRONG – WE MUST ADVANCE TO

THE NEXT STAGE OF FREEDOM.
The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to, – for I will
cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those
who neither know nor can do so well, – is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must
have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person
and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited
monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a limited democracy, is a progress toward a true
respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the
individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last
improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards
recognizing and organizing the rights of man?
2) Government-free society would allow everyone to be happy while oppressing

none.
3) THE ADVANTAGES OF CAPITALISM ARE NOTHING COMPARED TO

THOSE OF HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY.
Reformism, p.2
Life for the working class under capitalism, past and present, cannot be compared
favorably with the social benefits of a classless society in socialism which will convey to
all common ownership rights to the means of production and distribution, and democratic
privileges that no reformation of capitalism can ever attain. Attempting to make the
working class “better off” is no match for the advantages of socialism; and the wages
system, irrespective of wage levels, should justifiably be rejected when compared to free
access to all goods and services for all human beings.
4) Exploitation is never justified. We must not sacrifice any more lives.
30
AT: Anarchy Oppresses the Rich
1) Boo-Hoo
2) Government-free society would not eliminate any rights. It would just stop the
privileged from exploiting others. Exploitation is not a “natural right.”
3) By destroying hierarchy, we abolish the source of all oppression. In a totally-free

society like ours, it would be impossible for coercion to occur.
4) What the affirmative team sees as oppression, we see as a return of rights to the
disadvantaged. Their view is comparable to saying that abolition of slavery
oppressed slave owners are taking away their property.
31
Hierarchy-Free Society Saves Nature
— HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD HARMONIZE HUMANS AND

NATURE AND FOSTER BEAUTY.
I submit that we must go beyond the superficial layer of ideas created by “biocentricity,”
“antihumanism,” Malthusianism, and “deep ecology” at one extreme, and the belief in
growth, competition, human “supremacy,” and social power at the other extreme. We
must look at the social factors that have created both of these extremes in their many
different forms and answer key questions about the human condition if we are to
harmonize humanity’s relationship with nature.
What, after all, is human society when we try to view it from an ecological perspective?
A “Curse?” An unmitigated “blessing?” A “Device” for coping with material needs? Or,
dare I say, a product of natural evolution as well as culture that not only meets a wide
variety of human needs, but, potentially at least, can play a major role in fostering the
evolution of life on the planet.
— DEPRIVATIZATION IS ESSENTIAL FOR HUMAN AND ECOLOGICAL

SURVIVAL.
Hayward, Tim, of the University of Glasmorgan, 1994, Ecological Thought, p.189
This claim was already forcefully advanced in Murray Bookchin’s seminal writings of the
1960s which argue that ecological and anarchist principles are mutually reinforcing.
Bookchin believes there is not hierarchy in nature and that a society free of hierarchy is a
precondition for putting ecological principles into practice; decentralization is therefore
not only desirable but even necessary for human survival.
— AN END TO HIERARCHY WOULD BRING HUMANITY INTO PEACE

WITH NATURE AND ITSELF.
Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1995, Re-Enchanting Humanity, p.32
Social life, far from being divided from or placed in opposition to the natural world,
would then be rationally integrated with first nature as a self-conscious dimension of a
new, creative, richly differentiated, and meaningful whole. These goals, rooted in the
still-unfinished Enlightenment, constitute a vision and passion that takes full note of
humanity’s singularity and potential ability to ultimately create ecosocial institutions –
institutions that will bring human beings into harmony with one another and humanity
into harmony with the natural world.
32
Anarchy Gives “Plenty For All”
— HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD PROVIDE PLENTY FOR ALL.

No, plenty for all is not a dream – though it was a dream indeed in those days when man,
for all his pains, could hardly win a few bushels of wheat from an acre of land, and had to
fashion by hand all the implements he used in agriculture and industry. Now it is no
longer a dream, because man has invented a motor which, with a little iron and a few
sacks of coal, gives him mastery of a creature strong and docile as a horse, and capable of
setting the most complicated machinery in motion.
But if plenty for all is to become a reality, this immense capital – cities, houses, pastures,
arable lands, factories, highways, education – must cease to be regarded as private
property, for the monopolist to dispose of at his pleasure.
This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors,
must become common property, so that the collective interests of men may gain from it
the greatest good for all.
There must be expropriation. The well-being of all – the end; expropriation – the means.
— HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD PROVIDE EVERYONE WITH

BOTH FOOD AND LUXURIES.
We see that the worker, compelled to struggle painfully for bare existence, is reduced to
ignore the higher delights, the highest within man’s reach, of science, and especially of
scientific discovery; of art, and especially of artistic creation. It is in order to obtain for
all of us joys that are now reserved to a few; in order to give leisure and the possibility of
developing everyone’s intellectual capacities, that the social revolution must guarantee
daily bread for all. After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim.
No doubt, nowadays, when hundreds and thousands of human beings are in need of
bread, coal, clothing, and shelter, luxury is a crime; to satisfy it, the worker’s child must
go without bread! But in a society in which all have the necessary food and shelter, the
needs which we consider luxuries today will be more keenly felt.
33
Anarchy Gives “Plenty For All”
— ELIMINATION OF HIERARCHY WOULD FREE WORKERS FROM

MISERY, GIVING THEM THE LUXURIES OF HUMANITY.
What interest, in fact, can this depressing work have for the worker, when he knows that
the fate awaiting him from the cradle to the grave will be to live in mediocrity, poverty,
and insecurity of the morrow? Therefore, when we see the immense majority of men
take up their wretched task every morning, we feel surprised at their perseverance, at
their zeal for work, at the habit that enables them, like machines blindly obeying an
impetus given, to lead this life of misery without hope for the morrow; without
foreseeing ever so vaguely that some day they, or at least their children, will be part of a
humanity rich in all the treasures of a bountiful nature, in all the enjoyments of
knowledge, scientific and artistic creation, reserved today to a few privileged favourites.
It is precisely to put an end to this separation between manual and brain work that we
want to abolish wagedom, that we want the Social Revolution. Then work will no longer
appear a curse of fate: it will become what it should be – the free exercise of all the
faculties of man.
34
Anarchy Frees
— HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETIES PROMOTE INDIVIDUAL AUTONOMY

AND LIBERTY.
Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us
the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities.
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of
religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation
from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order
based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth;
an order that will guarantee to every human being free access of the earth and full
enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and
inclinations.
— A HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD PRODUCE HAPPINESS,

LIBERTY, AND JOY.
For the day on which old institutions will fall under the proletarian axe, voices will cry
out: “Bread, shelter, ease for all!” And those voices will be listened to; the people will
say: “Let us begin by allaying our thirst for life, for happiness, for liberty, that we have
never quenched. And when we shall have tasted of this joy, we will set to work to
demolish the last vestiges of middle-class rule: its ‘mine and yours’ institutions. ‘In
demolishing we shall build’, as Proudhon said; and we shall build in the name of
Communism and Anarchy.
— ANARCHISM ALONE FORWARDS TRUE HUMANITY AND FREEDOM.

Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings man the consciousness of himself; which
maintains that God, the State, and society are nonexistent, that their promises are null and
void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination. Anarchism is
therefore the teacher of the unity of life; not merely in nature, but in man. There is no
conflict between the individual and the social instincts, any more than there is between
the heart and the lungs: the one the receptacle of a precious life essence, the other the
repository of the element that keeps the essence pure and strong. The individual is the
heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are
distributing the element to keep the life essence – that is, the individual – pure and
strong.
35
Anarchy Frees
— IN A HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY EQUALITY WOULD REIGN.

So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to
assure shelter, food, and clothes to all – an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class
citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy
to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied.
All the same, we maintain our contention: bread must be found for the people of the
Revolution, and the question of bread must take precedence of all other questions. If it is
settled in the interests of the people, the Revolution will be on the right road; for in
solving the question of Bread we must accept the principle of equality, which will force
itself upon us to the exclusion of every other solution.
— A SOCIETY WITHOUT GOVERNMENT WOULD GRANT THE ONLY TRUE

FREEDOM.
Wolff, Robert, 1976, In Defense of Anarchism, p.81
The argument runs thus: men cannot be free so long as they are subject to the will of
others, whether one man or several. But if men rule themselves, if they are both law-
givers and law-obeyers, then they can combine the benefits of government with the
blessings of freedom. Rule for the people is merely benevolent slavery, but rule by the
people is true freedom.
Anarchy Grants Independence
— WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, HUMANITY WOULD BE INDEPENDENT AND

FREE.
In destroying government and statutory laws, anarchism proposes to rescue the self-
respect and independence of the individual from all restraint and invasion by authority.
Only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think
and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of
the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundation of a normal
social life.
36
Anarchy Solves For Crime
— GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETY WOULD ELIMINATE CRIME.

Rothbard, Murray, an economist, 1978, Nomos XIX: Anarchism, p.193
I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperation
and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the
tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and
the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the
state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of anti-
social crime – theft, oppression, mass murder – on a massive scale, then surely
abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and
discourage the bad.
— GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETY IS THE BEST ANSWER TO CRIME.

Carter, April, a professor of political science, 1971, The Political Theory of Anarchism,
p.40
Where the level of violent crimes is exceptionally high, or gangsterism particularly well
entrenched, the anarchist case for abolishing the police may be most persuasive. In the
United States, for example, an official Commission on the Causes and Prevention of
Violence has stressed that poverty is the main cause of the crime rate, and urged the need
to completely rebuild American cities. Nor does the existence of a police force
sufficiently reassure the large number of householders who fear to walk outdoors at night,
or have invested in their own guns – a truly Hobbesian picture.
37
AT: Can’t Reject Capitalism
1) We have to at least try to undo our mistakes. There are still vestiges of free
humanity remaining. These could be expanded.
2) WE CAN REJECT CAPITALISM AND SAVE OURSELVES.

Therefore capitalism must go if we are to survive as a civilization and, indeed, a species;

and all partial measures and reforms should be taken in the spirit of bringing about
capital’s downfall. Nothing could seem more daunting than this, indeed, in the current
balance of forces, it seems inconceivable. Therefore the first job must be to conceive it as
a possibility, and not to succumb passively to the given situation. Capital expresses no
law of nature; it has been the result of choice, and there is no essential reason to assume it
cannot be un-chosen. Conceiving things this way is scarcely sufficient. But it is
necessary, in both a moral and a practical sense.
3) I’m rejecting capitalism right now. All we have to do is convince more people to
think like me.
38
Anarchy Solves For War
— A HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY WOULD BE IMMUNE TO WAR AND

MOST SOCIAL PROBLEMS.
Reformism, p.9
There can be no poverty in a classless society, technologically capable of satisfying the

needs of the population, with free access to all goods and services. There can be no
unemployment, when all men and women are co-owners of the means of production and
distribution, giving of their abilities in useful work for society as well as for themselves.
There can be no insecurity when all “needs” can be satisfied as the result of “common
ownership” and “free access.” There can be no war when humanity is united as a whole
without states, national boundaries, or armed forces; with production and distribution
solely for use, and not for profit, eliminating money, wages, exchange, and the “market
place.”
39
AT: Governments Would Take Over Communes
1) Societies of free individuals would have nothing to offer nations – they would
have no marketable goods.
2) ANARCHIST SOCIETIES COULD DEFEND THEMSELVES.

Wolff, Robert, 1976, In Defense of Anarchism, p.81
If we assume a society of anarchists – a society, that is to say, which has achieved a level
of moral and intellectual development at which superstitious beliefs in legitimacy of
authority have evaporated – then the citizenry would be perfectly capable of choosing
freely whether to defend the nation and carry its purpose beyond the national borders.
The army itself could be run on the basis of voluntary commitments and submission to
orders.
3) Extend- Bookchin in 1971: Once the U.S. acts, freedom will spread,
communitizing the possible enemies.
4) ONCE PEOPLE HAVE LEARNED ABOUT THEIR FREEDOM, THEY

CANNOT BE ENSLAVED.
Douglass, Frederic, civil rights activist, August 4, 1857
Find out just what the people will submit to and you have found out the exact amount of
injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until
they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are
prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.
5) It has been empirically proven – hierarchy-free communities don’t go to war.
6) ANARCHIST COMMUNITIES WOULD USE SOCIAL MEANS TO

PRESERVE LIBERTY.
Sharp, Gene, of the Albert Einstein Institute, 1990, Civilian-Based Defense, p.33
The degree of liberty or tyranny in any political society is, it follows, largely a reflection
of the relative determination of the subjects to be free, of their willingness and ability to
organize themselves to live in freedom and, very importantly, their ability to resist any
efforts to dominate or enslave them. Social power, not technological means of
destruction, is the strongest guarantee of human freedom.
40
AT: Anarchy Promotes Chaotic Individualism
1) GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETIES WOULD BE COMMUNITIES – NOT

PLACES FOR CHAOTIC INDIVIDUALISM.
McIntosh, Don, a professor of philosophy, 1978, Nomos XIX: Anarchism, p.269
Anarchism, however, is not for the individualist. It is inherently collectivistic. Those who
have espoused anarchism on individualistic grounds are in error. Their views have not
been internally coherent, or have rested on weak psychological or sociological grounds.
2) Extend- Bakunin in 1870: The new society would not favor individualists.
3) THE VIEW OF HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY AS “CHAOS” IS FLAWED.

Chomsky, Noam, a linguist and policy analyst, 1995, interview with Kevin Doyle,
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/rbr/noamrbr2.html
The general intellectual culture, as you know, associates “anarchism” with chaos,
violence, bombs, disruption, and so on. So people are often surprised when I speak
positively of anarchism and identify myself with leading traditions within it. But my
impression is that among the general public, the basic ideas seem reasonable when the
clouds are cleared away.
4) Turn/ Today’s society is horribly individualist – People are oppressed for the good
of exploiters.
41
AT: No Incentive To Work In Anarchy
1) PEOPLE IN A FREE SOCIETY WOULD WORK BETTER AND ATTAIN

GREATER WELL-BEING.
Well-being – that is to say, the satisfaction of physical, artistic, and moral needs, has
always been the most powerful stimulant to work. And where a hireling hardly succeeds
to produce the bare necessities with difficulty, a free worker, who sees ease and luxury
increasing for him and for others in proportion to his efforts, spends infinitely far more
energy and intelligence, and obtains first-class products in a far greater abundance. The
one feels riveted to misery, the other hopes for ease and luxury in the future. In this lies
the whole secret. Therefore a society aiming at well-being of all, and at the possibility of
all enjoying life in all its manifestations, will give voluntary work, which will be
infinitely superior and yield far more than work has produced up till now under the goad
of slavery, serfdom, or wagedom.
2) This assumes modern society’s tendency toward exploitation which will disappear
once hierarchy is removed.
3) PEOPLE ARE ONLY LAZY AND BAD WORKERS BECAUSE HIERARCHY

FORCES THEM INTO MISERY.
Somebody has said that dust is matter in the wrong place. The same definition applies to
nine tenths of those called lazy. They are people gone astray in a direction that does not
answer to their temperament nor to their capacities. In reading the biography of great
men, we are struck with the number of ‘idlers’ among them. They were lazy so long as
they had not found the right path; afterwards they became laborious to excess. Darwin,
Stephenson, and many others belonged to this category of idlers.
Very often the idler is but a man to whom it is repugnant to spend all his life making the
eighteenth part of a pin, or the hundredth part of a watch, while he feels he has exuberant
energy which he would like to expend elsewhere. Often, too, he is a rebel who cannot
submit to being fixed all his life to a work-bench in order to procure a thousand pleasures
for his employer, while knowing himself to be far the less stupid of the two, and knowing
his only fault to be that of having been born in a hovel instead of coming into the world
in a castle.
4) Those who refuse to work could be excluded from the community. The majority
would not suffer.
42
AT: No Incentive To Work In Anarchy
5) FREEDOM WILL ELIMINATE LAZINESS TO THE EXTENT THAT LAWS

WOULD BE UNNECESSARY.
Give the workman who cannot condemn himself to make all his life a minute particle of
some object, who is stifled at his little tapping machine, which he ends by loathing, give
him the chance of tilling the soil, of felling trees in the forest, sailing the seas in the teeth
of a storm, dashing through space on an engine, but do not make an idler of him by
forcing him all his life to attend to a small machine, to plough the head of a screw, or to
drill the eye of a needle.
Suppress the cause of idleness, and you may take it for granted that few individuals will
really hate work, especially voluntary work, and that there will be no need to manufacture
a code of laws on their account.
6) LIBERATION OF THE SLAVES AND SERFS PROVES THAT PEOPLE

WORK HARDER WITHOUT COERCION.
They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work.
But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? Once, by
the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a
second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? “Without the whip
the Negro will not work,” said the anti-abolitionist. “Free from their master’s supervision
the serfs will Leave the fields uncultivated,” said the Russian serf-owners. It was the
refrain -of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old
as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away
injustice. And each time the actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792
ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestors; the emancipated Negro works
more than his fathers; and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of
his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an
eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where the soil is his,
he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of
value to slave-owners; as to the slaves themselves, they know what it is worth, as they
know its motive.
43
Anarchy Is Better Than Authoritarianism
— WE PROTECT FREEDOM BETTER THAN BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISTS.

Falk, Richard, a professor of International Law, 1978, Nomos XIX: Anarchism, p.65
Bureaucratic socialists, those who seek to seize state power rather than to decompose it,
contemptuously dismiss anarchists or libertarian socialists as utopians, or worse, as
reactionaries. But the anarchist response is more credible than the challenge here
presented. The anarchist quite properly contends that merely to seize power is to default
upon the humanist content of socialism and to create a new form of despotism.
44
Representative Democracy Is Oppressive
— EVEN REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACIES ARE OPPRESSIVE.

Hoffman, Robert, a professor of History, 1970, Anarchism, p.12
Anarchists believe that this ideal can not be fulfilled: those to whom the people’s
authority is delegated do not and can not act as their constituents require. Instead,
representatives and officials act in their own interests, those of political parties, and those
of privileged minorities with powers far in excess of ordinary people. Anarchists are
cynical about the possibilities of officials acting disinterestedly; there is too much
occasion for corruption by the prerogatives of power and by the methods needed to attain
power. Even when relatively uncorrupted and impartial, those in authority are too distant
from the bulk of the populace really to know their needs and beliefs.
45
AT: Perm
1) Extend- Friedman in 1989: Any remaining government returns society to statism.
2) HIERARCHY-FREE SOCIETY AND STATISM ARE MUTUALLY

EXCLUSIVE – GOVERNMENTS CANNOT ACCEPT OUR GOALS.
Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1971, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p.78
Anarchism is not only a stateless society but also a harmonized society which exposes
man to the stimuli provided by both agrarian and urban life, to physical activity and
mental activity, to unrepressed sensuality and self-directed spirituality, to communal
solidarity and individual development, to regional uniqueness and worldwide
brotherhood, to spontaneity and self-discipline, to the elimination of toil and the
promotion of craftsmanship. In our schizoid society, these goals are regarded as mutually
exclusive, indeed as sharply opposed.
3) You can’t simply have the affirmative policy standing alone as the sole
governance structure. It’s solvency requires enforcement, funding, and political
passage – all responsibilities of other government agencies.
4) Extend- Bakunin in 1870: Any act of government control is oppressive.
5) In order for a hierarchy-free society to succeed, a clear message must be sent to

the people that government is wrong. The permutation would muddle this message
and pervert the counterplan’s ideals.
6) HISTORY PROVES THAT LIMITED GOVERNMENTS EXPAND.

Friedman, David, a professor at the University of Chicago, 1989, The Machinery of
Freedom, p.146
Would it not be better to have a severely limited government doing those few things
which it could do better? Perhaps it would be – if the government stayed that way. Here
we run into the problem discussed in Chapter 4. One cannot simply build any imaginable
characteristics into a government; governments have their own internal dynamic. And the
internal dynamic of limited governments is something with which we, to our sorrow,
have a good deal of personal experience. It took about 150 years, starting with the Bill of
Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the
federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed
to your own hogs is interstate commerce and can therefore be regulated by Congress
46
AT: Anarchy Would Lead To Primitivism
1) Turn/ A hierarchy-free society would actually find more, better, and more
liberating uses for technology than exist in the status quo.
2) Our counterplan doesn’t say that we reject technology! For this argument to
carry any weight, the affirmative team has to prove that our authors are against
technology.
3) A GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIETY WOULD EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY TO

ENHANCE HUMANITY AND NATURE.
Bookchin, Murray, president of Goddard College, 1971, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p.134
A liberated society, I believe, will not want to negate technology precisely because it is
liberated and can strike a balance. It may well want to assimilate the machine to artistic
craftsmanship. By this I mean the machine will remove toil from the productive process,
leaving its artistic completion to man. The machine, in effect, will participate in human
creativity. There is no reason why automatic, cybernated machinery cannot be used so
that the finishing products, especially those destined for personal use, is left to the
community.
4) Kropotkin and Bookchin, primary authors, specifically rely upon advanced

technology to reduce drudgery and toil.
47
AT: Anarchy Would Lead To Primitivism
— LAWS ARE UNJUST HINDRANCES TO HUMANITY WHICH CAN BE

TRANSCENDED.
Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality – that it never secures any moral
right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate – who is
invariably the Devil – and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the
Devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of
probity – who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the
majority. The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls – the worst
man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you
drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your
chamber into the street every morning.
— WE MUST TRANSGRESS UNJUST LAWS.

Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them,
and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? Men
generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have
persuaded the majority to alter them. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy
would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy
is worse than the evil. It makes it worse. Why is it not more apt to anticipate and provide
for reform? Why does it not cherish its wise minority? Why does it cry and resist before it
is hurt? Why does it not encourage its citizens to be on the alert to point out its faults, and
do better than it would have them?
48
Laws Bad
— LAWS ARE CORRUPT AND FAIL.

Hoffman, Robert, a professor of history, 1970, Anarchism, p.5
Thus, in the anarchist view, people are deluded when they suppose that order and justice
are created and regulated by law and powerful institutions. Such order is mere
appearance, behind which actually is the chaos of men struggling to subjugate and hurt
each other, to gain at the expense of others. Such justice is a sham, called righteous by
those able to dominate while making law serve their own interests
49
AT: Anarchy Won’t Work With A Large Population
1) Government-free society would consist of decentralized communities. We could

liberate the entire world and still have small communities by simply shunning cities.
2) A LARGE POPULATION WOULD NOT HINDER GOVERNMENT-FREE

SOCIETY.
Nor can populations be so large or the number of assemblies so numerous that they
cannot be coordinated in a manner that perpetuates their integrity as face-to-face policy-
making bodies. Delegates to town, city, and regional bodies, can be regarded simply as
the walking mandates of the local assemblies.
3) With the increase in efficiency of production attained by liberation, government-

free society would be able to deal with large populations better than the status quo.
50
Everything Must Be Deprivatized
— ALL MUST BE DEPRIVATIZED – ARTICLES OF CONSUMPTION ARE AS

IMPORTANT AS THOSE OF PRODUCTION.
Some Socialists still seek, however, to establish a distinction. “Of course,” they say, “the
soil, the mines, the mills, and manufactures must be expropriated, these are the
instruments of production, and it is right we should consider them public property. But
articles of consumption – food, clothes, and dwellings – should remain private property.”
Popular common sense has got the better of this subtle distinction. We are not savages
who can live in the woods, without other shelter than branches. The civilized man needs a
roof, a room, a hearth, and a bed. It is true that the bed, the room, and the house is a home
of idleness for the non-producer. But for the worker, a room, properly heated and lighted,
is as much an instrument of production as the tool or the machine. It is the place where
the nerves and sinews gather strength for the work of the morrow.
51
AT: Unfair To Reward Skilled and Unskilled Labor Equally
1) In modern society, not everybody has the opportunity to get a job which requires
skills. The wealthy have great advantages that are inherited by their children while
poor families suffer eternally.
2) In a hierarchy-free society, everyone could choose their own job. People who
decide to take up skilled labor would do so because they enjoy it.
3) Unskilled labor is no worse than mind work. It’s only in modern society where
people are able to get away with exploiting others that physical jobs are seen as
degrading.
4) In a free society, everyone would have everything they needed. It would be

impossible to give extra bonuses to certain workers.
5) The only advantage to getting paid more than others is that you are brought into
a position of greater power. This power can only be used to enslave.
52
Wage System Will Fall With Capitalism
— THE WAGE SYSTEM WILL FALL ALONGSIDE CAPITALISM.

The wage system arises out of the individual ownership of the land and the instruments of
labor. It was the necessary condition for the development of capitalist production, and
will perish with it, in spite of the attempt to disguise it as “profit-sharing”. The common
possession of the instruments of labor must necessarily bring with it the enjoyment in
common of the fruits of common labor.
53
AT: Anarchy Is Utopian
1) Extend- Kropotkin in 1906: All we have to do to destroy hierarchy is to strike at it

once.
2) THE ACTS OF A FEW, BRAVE INDIVIDUALS COULD BE ENOUGH TO

SPUR SOCIETAL CHANGE.
Kropotkin, Peter, an anarchist theorist, 1880, The Spirit of Revolt (within Le Revolt)
When a revolutionary situation arises in a country, before the spirit of revolt is

sufficiently awakened in the masses to express itself in violent demonstrations in the
streets or by rebellions and uprisings, it is through action that minorities succeed in
awakening that feeling of independence and that spirit of audacity without which no
revolution can come to a head. Men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever
searching for the means to transform them into action, – men of integrity for whom the
act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life
contrary to their principles,--intrepid souls who know that it is necessary to dare in order
to succeed, – these are the lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses
are sufficiently roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arms in
hand, to the conquest of their rights. In the midst of discontent, talk, theoretical
discussions, an individual or collective act of revolt supervenes, symbolizing the
dominant aspirations.
3) Hierarchy-free societies existed before in ancient Crete and the Middle-ages. It

can happen again.
4) WE CAN REJECT HIERARCHY AND SAVE OURSELVES.

Therefore capitalism must go if we are to survive as a civilization and, indeed, a species;

and all partial measures and reforms should be taken in the spirit of bringing about
capital’s downfall. Nothing could seem more daunting than this, indeed, in the current
balance of forces, it seems inconceivable. Therefore the first job must be to conceive it as
a possibility, and not to succumb passively to the given situation. Capital expresses no
law of nature; it has been the result of choice, and there is no essential reason to assume it
cannot be un-chosen. Conceiving things this way is scarcely sufficient. But it is
necessary, in both a moral and a practical sense.
5) We have to at least try to move beyond the current system of enslavement.
54
AT: Anarchy Is Utopian
6) WE CAN ADVANCE TO THE NEXT STEP IN SOCIETY TO ATTAIN

FREEDOM.
The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit to, – for I will
cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those
who neither know nor can do so well, – is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must
have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person
and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited
monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a limited democracy, is a progress toward a true
respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the
individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last
improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards
recognizing and organizing the rights of man?
55
AT: Cards Are Too Old
1) Although our evidence is old, it comes from some of most respected thinkers of all
time.
2) Issues of slavery and dehumanization don’t change over time. Oppression is

always wrong.
3) We do read recent evidence from Bookchin and Friedman, proving that thoughts
of a hierarchy-free society still exist.
4) The age of our evidence further proves the fact that hierarchy is always
damaging.
5) The affirmative’s evidence is from journalists, authors, and professors. We quote

some of the founders of the freedom movement – people who actually experienced
oppression in Russia and Germany.
56
Must act against Government
— OBEYING UNJUST LAWS AND GOVERNMENTS IS IMMORAL AND

COUNTERPRODUCTIVE.
The amount of it is, if the majority vote the Devil to be God, the minority will live and
behave accordingly – and obey the successful candidate, trusting that, some time or other,
by some Speaker's casting-vote, perhaps, they may reinstate God. This is the highest
principle I can get out or invent for my neighbors. These men act as if they believed that
they could safely slide down a hill a little way – or a good way – and would surely come
to a place, by and by, where they could begin to slide up again. This is expediency, or
choosing that course which offers the slightest obstacles to the feet, that is, a downhill
one. But there is no such thing as accomplishing a righteous reform by the use of
"expediency." There is no such thing as sliding up hill. In morals the only sliders are
backsliders.
— IT IS COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO DEMAND REFORM FROM THE

GOVERNMENT – INDIVIDUALS MUST ACT AGAINST OPPRESSION.
The broadest and most prevalent error requires the most disinterested virtue to sustain it.
The slight reproach to which the virtue of patriotism is commonly liable, the noble are
most likely to incur. Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a
government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most
conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some
are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the
President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves, – the union between themselves and
the state, – and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?
57

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STATISM KRITIK CONTENTS

A) Framework: GOVERNMENT-FREE SOCIAL LIBERTY WOULD

2) HIERARCHICAL SOCIETY DEVOURS NATURE LIKE AN UNTREATED

3) GOVERNMENT-BASED SOCIETY EXPLOITS AND DEGRADES THE POOR

4) GOVERNMENTS ARE INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE AND CAUSE CRIME.

5) CAPITALISM AND GOVERNMENTS LEGITIMIZE EVIL AND

— HIERARCHY IS HYPOCRITICAL AND DOOMED TO EXTINCTION.

— CAPITALISM FORCES WORKERS INTO A REPULSIVE AND

— CAPITALISM MECHANIZES HUMANS.

— HIERARCHY MECHANIZES AND IMPRISONS SOCIETY.

— CLASS INEQUITIES OPPRESS THE MASSES, ROBBING THEM OF THE

— OPPRESSION OF THE MASSES WILL OCCUR SO LONG AS DIVISION OF

— CAPITALISM IS AS BARBARIC AS FEUDALISM.

— DEMOCRATIC GOVERNMENTS ARE JUST AS OPPRESSIVE AS ANY

— CAPITALISM NEVER HELPS WORKERS – IT LEADS TO SEXISM,

— THE WAGE SYSTEM DENIES WORKERS THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE.

— GOVERNMENT IS THE “NEGATION OF HUMANITY” – THE OPPOSITE

— CAPITALISM IS THE SOURCE OF ALL OF OUR SOCIAL EVILS AND

Indeed, capitalism completely incarnates Bakunin’s notion of “evil” without the

— GOVERNMENTS DO NOT FOSTER JUSTICE – THEY DEHUMANIZINGLY

— GOVERNMENTS CANNOT AVOID POVERTY AND EXPLOITATION.

— GOVERNMENTS COERCE AND DOMINATE, DESTROYING SOCIETY.

— WE MUST NOT BE COERCED BY GOVERNMENTS – THEY DON’T WORK

— GOVERNMENTS ARE INHERENTLY VIOLENT AND OPPRESSING.

— ULTIMATE FREEDOM CAN BE ATTAINED ONLY WHEN THE STATE IS

— GOVERNMENTS UNNECESSARILY DESTROY LIBERTY AND FREEDOM.

— GOVERNMENT, OR A CONTROLLING SOCIAL STRUCTURE – IS THE

The instinct to command others, in its primitive essence, is a carnivorous, altogether

— CAPITALISM TYRANNICALLY CONTROLS.

What is called 'capitalism' is basically a system of corporate mercantilism, with huge

— GOVERNMENTS MECHANIZE HUMANS, CAUSING EVIL.

— TRULY HUMAN COMMUNITIES CANNOT DEVELOP UNDER

— GOVERNMENTS ARE HIDEOUS MONSTERS WHICH CONSUME

— CAPITALISM PRODUCES INNUMERABLE SOCIAL ILLS, THREATENING

It is a model of global integration built on all-round splintering and polarizing,

— GOVERNMENTS ARE OPPOSED TO THE BASIC HUMAN VALUES.

— THE INJUSTICE OF LAWS AND GOVERNMENT TURN OUR LIVES INTO

— GOVERNMENTS DESTROY EQUALITY WITH BRUTAL DOMINATION.

Equality of political rights, or a democratic State, constitute in themselves the most

— GOVERNMENT-CAUSED SOCIAL HIERARCHY LEADS TO CRIME.

— GOVERNMENTS ARE THE CAUSE OF CRIME.

— GOVERNMENT ACTION CREATES COMPLETE DEPENDENCY.

— CAPITALISM CAUSES WARS AND RISKS NUCLEAR EXTERMINATION.

— HIERARCHY RISKS ECOLOGICAL EXTINCTIONS.

— HIERARCHY IS INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE TO ALL LIFE.

Capitalist society, whether in Western corporate or Eastern bureaucratic forms, is

— THE CAPITALIST-BASED ECOLOGICAL CRISIS THREATENS SURVIVAL.

— CAPITALISM KILLS BEAUTY, THE EXISTENCE OF NATURE, AND THE

— CAPITALISM DRIVES ALL FORCES WHICH DESTROY NATURE.

It is capital that conditions and drives separate determinations in an ecologically

— OPPRESSION OF HUMANS MUST CEASE BEFORE WE CAN STOP

2) CLASSISM CRIPPLES BOTH THE RICH AND THE POOR.

— GOVERNMENTS FAIL TO REPRESENT THE WILL OF THE PEOPLE.

— GOVERNMENTS OPPRESSIVELY IGNORE THE NEEDS OF SOCIETY.

A FREE SOCIETY CAN ONLY BE CONSTRUCTED FROM THE BOTTOM UP.

1) THE IDEA THAT IT IS HUMAN NATURE TO STRIVE FOR POWER IS

3) HUMANS COOPERATE TODAY WITHOUT GOVERNMENT

5) COMMUNALISM WORKED UNTIL IT WAS CRUSHED BY THE

1) CAPITALISM CAUSES MERE REFORMS TO INTENSIFY PROBLEMS AND

2) Extend- Kropotkin in 1880: Hierarchy is inherently destructive. We need a

3) IT’S COUNTERPRODUCTIVE TO DEMAND REFORM FROM THE

4) CAPITALISM DESTABILIZES NATURE IN WAYS THAT CANNOT BE

6) WE MUST HAVE COMMUNAL LIVING NOW – MERE REFORMS ONLY

The deluge of propaganda surrounding the reformist administration of capitalism