The basic principle of Modern Anarchism can be summarized as three, viz., the opposition and abolition of the State, the abolition of private property and the suppression of religion.
Opposition to the State.
Anarchism is opposed to the State in toto and advocates its abolition in all its forms and essence. The Anarchists are opposed not merely to the despotic and corrupt forms of the State, like autocracy, but also its best forms, like democratic and representative forms of government. They advance several arguments against the very nature and existence of the State as follow:
The State is based on power, which corrupts those who exercise it and dehumanises those against whom it is used.
The politician, for example, is wicked not because of his nature but because of his position; not because he is a man but because he is a politician. As Kropotkin remark: ‘This or that despicable minister might have been an excellent man, if power had not been given to him.” In the Anarchist view, democracy is as little to be preferred as despotism, for it is based on the use of force and power of the majority over minority. The theory of representative government is fallacious, for no one can represent another. A representative government is really a misrepresentative government. Liberty of the individual is the supreme goal of Anarchism, but liberty is only possible when the State and its coercive controls over the individual are abolished.
The State is an evil, for it protects an tvil, namely private property.
Private property, writes Bakunin, could not exist without the State and the State could not exist without private property. Each sustained the other, and each magnified the evils of the other. So long as either existed, the working class would be ground down and dispossessed.
The State is superfluous and unnecessary.
The Anarchists reject the age-old thesis of Aristotle that the State exists to do well, i.e., for the moral expression and perfection of the individual. They declare that it does no good to the individual or to the society. Kropotkin holds that it is without any natural or any historical justification. In short, according to the Anarchists, the State in all its forms is both unnecessary and injurious for all relations, activities and achievements of mankind. It can perform only one function: it should sign its death-warrant and vanish. There was no State in the early history of mankind and there will be no State in the future.
Opposition to Property.
Second basic tenet of Anarchism is the opposition to the system of private property and capitalism, as does Socialism in general. They are condemned: firstly, because they generate all social and economic evils in human life; and, secondly, because they are not necessary for production. The evil effects of private property and capitalism are found among both the workers and the capitalists; according to Kropotkin, “among the masses— want and misery, millions unemployed, children of retarded growth, constant debts for the farmers; among the wealthy few—prodigality, ostentation, idleness, leading to the pursuit of coarser pleasures, debasing the press, and inciting war.” Kropotkin says further, “Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and present.
By what right, then, can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say—’This is mine, not yours?” Hence, by its very nature, private property is an offence against justice, for under it a minority retains the major benefits created by the combined efforts of multitudes of mankind of the present and past generations.
Opposition to Religion.
Anarchists also condemn religion for the reason that while the State protects the evil institutions in the existing society, religion sanctifies them. As Bakunin says, religion is consciously used by the possessors of wealth and political power to perpetuate their unnatural superiority. It diverts human mind from the affairs of this world to those of the other and feeds it on fancy, superstition and credulity and insults human reason and intelligence. “Religious faith should be displaced by science and knowledge; the fiction of future divine justice by the actuality of present human justice.” Kropotkin also condemned religion on both scientific and spiritual grounds.
Religion, he said, “is either a primitive cosmogony, a crude attempt at explaining nature, or is an ethical system which, through its appeals to the ignorance and superstitions of the masses, cultivates among them a tolerance of the injustices they suffer under the existing political and economic arrangements” He further says that the existing religions should be replaced by “social morality”— a natural religion, which is essential to any society, for “no society can exist without certain moral habits and rules that evolve unconsciously and as a consequence of which men respect one another’s interests and rely upon one another’s words.” it is a true morality, for it will last while religion and its system of philosophy will pass away.