Anarchists are well aware that an anarchist society will have to defend itself from both inside and outside attempts to re-impose capitalism and the state. Indeed, every revolutionary anarchist has argued that a revolution will have to defend itself.
Unfortunately, Marxists have consistently misrepresented anarchist ideas on this subject. Lenin, for example, argued that the "proletariat needs the state only temporarily. We do not at all disagree with the anarchists on the question of the abolition of the state as an aim. We maintain that, to achieve this aim, we must temporarily make use of the instruments, resources and methods of state power against the exploiters, just as the dictatorship of the oppressed class is temporarily necessary for the abolition of classes. Marx chooses the sharpest and clearest way of stating his position against the anarchists: after overthrowing the yoke of the capitalists, should workers 'lay down their arms' or use them against the capitalists in order to crush their resistance? But what is the systematic use of arms by one class against the other, if not a 'transitory form' of state." ["The State and Revolution", Essential Works of Lenin, p. 316]
Fortunately, as Murray Bookchin points out, anarchists are "not so naive as to believe anarchism could be established overnight. In imputing this notion to Bakunin, Marx and Engels wilfully distorted the Russian anarchist's views. Nor did the anarchists . . . believe that the abolition of the state involved 'laying down arms' immediately after the revolution. . ." [Post-Scarcity Anarchism, p. 213] Even a basic familiarity with the work of anarchist thinkers would make the reader aware that Bookchin is right. As we shall see, anarchists have consistently argued that a revolution and an anarchist society needs to be defended against those who would try and re-introduce hierarchy, domination, oppression and exploitation (even, as with Leninists, they call themselves "socialists"). As Malatesta argued in 1891:
"Many suppose that . . . anarchists, in the name of their principles, would wish to see that strange liberty respected which violates and destroys the freedom and life of others. They seem almost to believe that after having brought down government and private property we would allow both to be quietly built up again, because of a respect for the freedom of those who might feel the need to be rulers and property owners. A truly curious way of interpreting our ideas!" [Anarchy, p. 41]
Anarchists reject the idea that defending a revolution, or even the act of revolution itself, represents or requires a "state." As Malatesta argued, the state "means the delegation of power, that is the abdication of initiative and sovereignty of all into the hands of a few." [Op. Cit., p. 40] Luigi Fabbri stresses this when he argued that, for anarchists, "the essence of the state . . . [is] centralised power or to put it another way the coercive authority of which the state enjoys the monopoly, in that organisation of violence know as 'government'; in the hierarchical despotism, juridical, police and military despotism that imposes laws on everyone." ["Anarchy and 'Scientific' Communism", in The Poverty of Statism, pp. 13-49, Albert Meltzer (ed.), pp. 24-5] Therefore the state is the delegation of power, the centralisation of authority into the hands of a few at the top of society rather than a means of defending a revolution against the expropriated ruling class. To confuse the defence of a revolution and the state is, therefore, a great mistake as it introduces an inequality of power into a so-called socialist society. In the words of Voline:
"All political power inevitably creates a privileged situation for the men who exercise it. Thus is violates, from the beginning, the equalitarian principle and strikes at the heart of the Social Revolution . . . [and] becomes the source of other privileges . . . power is compelled to create a bureaucratic and coercive apparatus indispensable to all authority . . . Thus it forms a new privileged caste, at first politically and later economically. . . It sows everywhere the seed of inequality and soon infects the whole social organism . . . It predisposes the masses to passivity, and all sprite and initiative is stifled by the very existence of power, in the extent to which it is exercised." [The Unknown Revolution, p. 249]
Unsurprisingly, anarchists think a revolution should defend itself in the same way that it organises itself — from the bottom up, in a self-managed way. The means to defend an anarchist society or revolution are based around the organs of self-management that revolution creates. In the words of Bakunin:
"[T]he federative Alliance of all working men's associations . . . constitute the Commune . . .. Commune will be organised by the standing federation of the Barricades and by the creation of a Revolutionary Communal Council composed of one or two delegates from each barricade . . . vested with plenary but accountable and removable mandates . . . all provinces, communes and associations . . . reorganising on revolutionary lines . . . [would] send . . . their representatives to an agreed meeting place . . . vested with similar mandates to constitute the federation of insurgent associations, communes and provinces . . . [which would] organise a revolutionary force capable of defeating reaction . . . it is the very fact of the expansion and organisation of the revolution for the purpose of self-defence among the insurgent areas that will bring about the triumph of the revolution. . .
"Since revolution everywhere must be created by the people, and supreme control must always belong to the people organised in a free federation of agricultural and industrial associations . . . organised from the bottom upwards by means of revolutionary delegation. . . " [Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, pp. 170-2]
Thus we have a dual framework of revolution. On the one hand, the federation of workers' councils based on self-managed assemblies nominating mandated and accountable delegates. On the other, we have a federation of barricades, again based on self-management and mandated delegates, which actually defends the revolution against reaction. The success of the revolution depends on spreading it and organising joint self-defence. He stressed the importance of co-ordinating defence two years later, in 1870:
"[L]et us suppose . . . it is Paris that starts [the revolution] . . . Paris will naturally make haste to organise itself as best it can, in revolutionary style, after the workers have joined into associations and made a clean sweep of all the instruments of labour, every kind of capital and building; armed and organised by streets and quartiers, they will form the revolutionary federation of all the quartiers, the federative commune. . . All the French and foreign revolutionary communes will then send representatives to organise the necessary common services . . . and to organise common defence against the enemies of the Revolution, together with propaganda, the weapon of revolution, and practical revolutionary solidarity with friends in all countries against enemies in all countries." [Op. Cit., p. 178-9]
As can be seen, the revolution not only abolishes the state by a free federation of workers associations, it also expropriates capital and ends wage labour. Thus the "political revolution is transformed into social revolution." [Op. Cit., p. 171] Which, we must add, destroys another Marxist myth that claims that anarchists think, to quote Engels, that "the state is the chief evil, [and] it is above all the state which must be done away with and then capitalism will go to blazes," in other words, the "abolition of the state" comes before the "social revolution." [Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader p. 728] As can be clearly seen, anarchists consider the social revolution to be, at the same time, the abolition of the state along with the abolition of capitalism.
Therefore, Bakunin was well aware of the needs to defend a revolution after destroying the state and abolishing capitalism. It is clear that after a successful rising, the revolutionary population does not "lay down their arms" but rather organises itself in a federal to co-ordinate defence against reactionary areas which seek to destroy it.
Nor was Bakunin alone in this analysis. For example, we discover Errico Malatesta arguing that during a revolution we should "[a]rm all the population." The revolution would have "armed the people so that it can resist any armed attempt by reaction to re-establish itself." This revolution would involve "creation of a voluntary militia, without powers to interfere as militia in the life of the community, but only to deal with any armed attacks by the forces of reaction to re-establish themselves, or to resist outside intervention by countries as yet not in a state of revolution." Like Bakunin, Malatesta stresses the importance of co-ordinating activity via free federations of workers' associations — "the development of the revolution would be the task of volunteers, by all kinds of committees, local, intercommunal, regional and national congresses which would attend to the co-ordination of social activity," the "[o]rganisation of social life by means of free association and federations of producers and consumers, created and modified according to the wishes of their members," and so be "under the direct control of the people." Again, like Bakunin, the revolution would abolish state and capital, and "the workers . . . [should] take possession of the factories . . . federate among themselves . . . the peasants should take over the land and the produce usurped by the landlords." Ultimately, the "most powerful means for defending the revolution remains always that of taking away from the bourgeois the economic means on which their power rests, and of arming everybody (until such time as one will have managed to persuade everybody to throw away their arms as useless and dangerous toys), and of interesting the mass of the population in the victory of the revolution." [Life and Ideas, p. 170, p. 165, p. 166, pp. 165-6, p. 184, p. 175, p. 165 and p. 173]
Malatesta stresses that a government is not required to defend a revolution:
"But, by all means, let us admit that the governments of the still unemancipated countries were to want to, and could, attempt to reduce free people to a state of slavery once again. Would this people require a government to defend itself? To wage war men are needed who have all the necessary geographical and mechanical knowledge, and above all large masses of the population willing to go and fight. A government can neither increase the abilities of the former nor the will and courage of the latter. And the experience of history teaches us that a people who really want to defend their own country are invincible: and in Italy everyone knows that before the corps of volunteers (anarchist formations) thrones topple, and regular armies composed of conscripts or mercenaries disappear." [Anarchy, pp. 40-1]
The Spanish anarchist D. A. Santillan argued that the "local Council of Economy will assume the mission of defence and raise voluntary corps for guard duty and if need be, for combat" in the "cases of emergency or danger of a counter-revolution." These Local Councils would be a federation of workplace councils and would be members of the Regional Council of the Economy which, like the Local Council, would be "constitute[d] by delegations or through assemblies. [After the Revolution, p. 80 and pp. 82-83] Yet again we see the defence of the revolution based on the federation of workers' councils and so directly controlled by the revolutionary population.
Lastly, we turn to the Spanish CNT's 1936 resolution on Libertarian Communism. In this document is a section entitled "Defence of the Revolution" which argues:
"We acknowledge the necessity to defend the advances made through the revolution . . . So . . . the necessary steps will be taken to defend the new regime, whether against the perils of a foreign capitalist invasion . . . or against counter-revolution at home. It must be remembered that a standing army constitutes the greatest danger for the revolution, since its influence could lead to dictatorship, which would necessarily kill off the revolution. . .
"The people armed will be the best assurance against any attempt to restore the system destroyed from either within or without. . .
"Let each Commune have its weapons and means of defence . . . the people will mobilise rapidly to stand up to the enemy, returning to their workplaces as soon as they may have accomplished their mission of defence. . . .
"1. The disarming of capitalism implies the surrender of weaponry to the communes which be responsible for ensuring defensive means are effectively organised nationwide.
"2. In the international context, we shall have to mount an intensive propaganda drive among the proletariat of every country so that it may take an energetic protest, calling for sympathetic action against any attempted invasion by its respective government. At the same time, our Iberian Confederation of Autonomous Libertarian Communes will render material and moral assistance to all the world's exploited so that these may free themselves forever from the monstrous control of capitalism and the State." [quoted by Jose Peirats, The CNT in the Spanish Revolution, vol. 1, p. 110]
Therefore, an anarchist society defends itself in a non-statist fashion. Defence is organised in a libertarian manner, based on federations of free communes and workers' councils and incorporating self-managed workers' militias. This was exactly what the CNT-FAI did in 1936 to resist Franco's fascists. The militia bodies that were actually formed by the CNT in the revolution were internally self-governing, not hierarchical. Each militia column was administered by its own "war committee," made up of elected delegates, which in turn sent delegates to co-ordinate action on a specific front. Similarly, the Makhnovists during the Russian Revolution also organised in a democratic manner, subject to the decisions of the local workers' councils and their congresses.
Thus Anarchist theory and practice indicate that defence of a revolution need not involve a hierarchical system like the Bolshevik Red Army where the election of officers, soldiers' councils and self-governing assemblies were abolished by Trotsky in favour of officers appointed from above (see Trotsky's article The Path of the Red Army in which he freely admits to abolishing the soldiers "organs of revolutionary self-government" the Soviets of Soldiers' Deputies as well as "the system of election" of commanders by the soldiers themselves in favour of a Red Army "built from above" with appointed commanders).
As can be seen, the only armed force for the defence of the an anarchist society would be the voluntary, self-managed militia bodies organised by the free communes and federations of workers' associations. The militias would be unified and co-ordinated by federations of communes while delegates from each militia unit would co-ordinate the actual fighting. In times of peace the militia members would be living and working among the rest of the populace, and, thus, they would tend to have the same outlook and interests as their fellow workers.
Instead of organising a new state, based on top-down command and hierarchical power, anarchists argue that a revolutionary people can build and co-ordinate a militia of their own and control the defence of their revolution directly and democratically, through their own organisations (such as unions, councils of delegates elected from the shop floor and community, and so on). Where they have had the chance, anarchists have done so, with remarkable success. Therefore, an anarchist society can be defended against attempts to re-impose hierarchy and bosses (old or new).
For more discussion of this issue, see section J.7.6 ("How could an anarchist revolution defend itself?")