Anarchists viewed seizing state power as a road that would lead the working class to a new form of authoritarian class society, rather than the intended goal of communism. To understand why we need to first understand what anarchists meant by the state. Through an in-depth analysis of the state as an actually-existing social structure, both historically and at the time they were writing, anarchists came to define the state as a hierarchical and centralized institution that uses professionally organized violence to perform the function of reproducing class rule. The state so understood was wielded by a political ruling class (generals, politicians, high ranking civil servants, monarchs, etc) in their own interests, and in the interests of the economic ruling class (capitalists, landlords, etc), against the masses. Kropotkin, for example, writes that the state “not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a territorial concentration and a concentration of many functions in the life of societies in the hands of a few... A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing is developed to subject some classes to the domination of other classes.” The state is therefore “the perfect example of a hierarchical institution, developed over centuries to subject all individuals and all of their possible groupings to the central will. The State is necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian — or it ceases to be the State.”[2]
Anarchists argued that the state, like all social structures, is constituted by forms of human activity and so participating in the state produces and reproduces particular kinds of people and particular kinds of social relations. This occurs irrespective of the intentions or goals of people because what matters is the nature of the social structure they are participating in and the forms of activity this social structure is constituted by and reproduced through. For Reclus, socialists who enter the state “have placed themselves in determinate conditions that in turn determine them.”[3] Those who wield state power will therefore engage in forms of human activity that will over time transform them into oppressors of the working class who are concerned with reproducing and expanding their power over other people. Anarchists held that this process of socialists being transformed into oppressors would occur both to socialists who are elected into the currently existing capitalist state and also to socialists who attempt to seize the existing state via a coup and transform it into a workers’ state.
Anarchists thought this would occur for two main reasons. Firstly, the state is a centralized and hierarchical institution in which a political ruling class monopolize decision making power and determine the lives of the majority who are subject to their rule. The minority of socialists who actually exercise state power will therefore impose decisions on and determine the lives of the working class, rather than enabling the working class to self-direct their own lives. In Malatesta’s words,
Whoever has power over things has power over men; whoever governs production also governs the producers; who determines consumption is master over the consumer. This is the question; either things are administered on the basis of free agreement among the interested parties, and this is anarchy; or they are administered according to laws made by administrators and this is government, it is the State, and inevitably it turns out to be tyrannical.[4]
Secondly, through engaging in the activity of wielding state power socialists will be corrupted by their position of authority at the top of a social hierarchy and be transformed into people who will neither want to nor try to abolish their own power over others. According to Reclus,
Anarchists contend that the state and all that it implies are not any kind of pure essence, much less a philosophical abstraction, but rather a collection of individuals placed in a specific milieu and subjected to its influence. Those individuals are raised up above their fellow citizens in dignity, power, and preferential treatment, and are consequently compelled to think themselves superior to the common people. Yet in reality the multitude of temptations besetting them almost inevitably leads them to fall below the general level.[5]