“The question of whether the state should engage in violence, or whether state violence should be evaluated in terms of the same standards of reasonableness as violence by nonstate actors, never crosses the threshold of visibility.”
“The state is not a mystical entity, a sum greater than the human beings making it up. The state is simply a group of human beings cooperating for common purposes — purposes frequently at odds with those of other groups of people, like the majority of people in the same society. And violent actions by an association of individuals who call themselves ‘the state’ have no more automatic legitimacy than violent actions by associations of individuals who call themselves ‘the Ku Klux Klan’ or ‘al Qaeda.’”
That is the first and greatest truth of anarchism, articulated here by Kevin Carson at the Center for a Stateless Society. (I’ve got to finally get around to reading Kevin’s The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, which is freely available online here.)
The second is like unto it: “Unless you want world government, you’re already an anarchist. We’re just haggling over the level.” — Sheldon Richman
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