Difference between revisions of "FAQAnar:F.8 - Quel rÃ´le l'Ã‰tat a-t-il pris dans la crÃ©ation du capitalisme ?"

If the "anarcho"-capitalist is to claim with any plausibility that "real" capitalism is non-statist or that it can exist without a state, it must be shown that capitalism evolved naturally, in opposition to state intervention. In reality, the opposite is the case. Capitalism was born from state intervention. In the words of Kropotkin, "the State . . . and capitalism . . . developed side by side, mutually supporting and re-enforcing each other." [Anarchism, p. 181]

Numerous writers have made this point. For example, in Karl Polanyi's flawed masterpiece The Great Transformation we read that "the road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organised and controlled interventionism" by the state. [p. 140] This intervention took many forms -- for example, state support during "mercantilism," which allowed the "manufactures" (i.e. industry) to survive and develop, enclosures of common land, and so forth. In addition, the slave trade, the invasion and brutal conquest of the Americas and other "primitive" nations, and the looting of gold, slaves, and raw materials from abroad also enriched the European economy, giving the development of capitalism an added boost. Thus Kropotkin:

"The history of the genesis of capital has already been told by socialists many times. They have described how it was born of war and pillage, of slavery and serfdom, of modern fraud and exploitation. They have shown how it is nourished by the blood of the worker, and how little by little it has conquered the whole world . . . Law . . . has followed the same phases as capital . . . they have advanced hand in hand, sustaining one another with the suffering of mankind." [Op. Cit., p. 207] This process is what Karl Marx termed "primitive accumulation" and was marked by extensive state violence. Capitalism, as he memorably put it, "comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt" and the "starting-point of the development that gave rise both to the wage-labourer and to the capitalist was the enslavement of the worker." [Capital, vol. 1, p. 926 and p. 875] Or, if Kropotkin and Marx seem too committed to be fair, we have John Stuart Mill's summary that the "social arrangements of modern Europe commenced from a distribution of property which was the result, not of just partition, or acquisition by industry, but of conquest and violence." [Principles of Political Economy, p. 15]

The same can be said of all countries. As such, when supporters of "libertarian" capitalism say they are against the "initiation of force," they mean only new initiations of force: for the system they support was born from numerous initiations of force in the past (moreover, it also requires state intervention to keep it going -- section D.1 addresses this point in some detail). Indeed, many thinkers have argued that it was precisely this state support and coercion (particularly the separation of people from the land) that played the key role in allowing capitalism to develop rather than the theory that "previous savings" did so. As left-wing German thinker Franz Oppenheimer (whom Murray Rothbard selectively quoted) argued, "the concept of a 'primitive accumulation,' or an original store of wealth, in land and in movable property, brought about by means of purely economic forces" while "seem[ing] quite plausible" is in fact "utterly mistaken; it is a 'fairly tale,' or it is a class theory used to justify the privileges of the upper classes." [The State, pp. 5-6] As Individualist anarchist Kevin Carson summarised as part of his excellent overview of this historic process:

"Capitalism has never been established by means of the free market. It has always been established by a revolution from above, imposed by a ruling class with its origins in the Old Regime . . . by a pre-capitalist ruling class that had been transformed in a capitalist manner. In England, it was the landed aristocracy; in France, Napoleon III's bureaucracy; in Germany, the Junkers; in Japan, the Meiji. In America, the closest approach to a 'natural' bourgeois evolution, industrialisation was carried out by a mercantilist aristocracy of Federalist shipping magnates and landlords." ["Primitive Accumulation and the Rise of Capitalism," Studies in Mutualist Political Economy] This, the actual history of capitalism, will be discussed in the following sections. So it is ironic to hear right-"libertarians" sing the praises of a capitalism that never existed and urge its adoption by all nations, in spite of the historical evidence suggesting that only state intervention made capitalist economies viable -- even in that Mecca of "free enterprise," the United States. As Noam Chomsky argues, "who but a lunatic could have opposed the development of a textile industry in New England in the early nineteenth century, when British textile production was so much more efficient that half the New England industrial sector would have gone bankrupt without very high protective tariffs, thus terminating industrial development in the United States? Or the high tariffs that radically undermined economic efficiency to allow the United States to develop steel and other manufacturing capacities? Or the gross distortions of the market that created modern electronics?" [World Orders, Old and New, p. 168] Such state interference in the economy is often denounced and dismissed by right-"libertarians" as mercantilism. However, to claim that "mercantilism" is not capitalism makes little sense. Without mercantilism, "proper" capitalism would never have developed, and any attempt to divorce a social system from its roots is ahistoric and makes a mockery of critical thought (particularly as "proper" capitalism turns to mercantilism regularly).

Similarly, it is somewhat ironic when "anarcho"-capitalists and other right "libertarians" claim that they support the freedom of individuals to choose how to live. After all, the working class was not given that particular choice when capitalism was developing. Instead, their right to choose their own way of life was constantly violated and denied -- and justified by the leading capitalist economists of the time. To achieve this, state violence had one overall aim, to dispossess the labouring people from access to the means of life (particularly the land) and make them dependent on landlords and capitalists to earn a living. The state coercion "which creates the capital-relation can be nothing other than the process which divorces the worker from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour; it is a process which operates two transformations, whereby the social means of subsistence and production are turned into capital, and the immediate producers are turned into wage-labourers. So-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production." [Marx, Op. Cit., pp. 874-5] So to claim that now (after capitalism has been created) we get the chance to try and live as we like is insulting in the extreme. The available options we have are not independent of the society we live in and are decisively shaped by the past. To claim we are "free" to live as we like (within the laws of capitalism, of course) is basically to argue that we are able (in theory) to "buy" the freedom that every individual is due from those who have stolen it from us in the first place. It ignores the centuries of state violence required to produce the "free" worker who makes a "voluntary" agreement which is compelled by the social conditions that this created.

The history of state coercion and intervention is inseparable from the history of capitalism: it is contradictory to celebrate the latter while claiming to condemn the former. In practice capitalism has always meant intervention in markets to aid business and the rich. That is, what has been called by supporters of capitalism "laissez-faire" was nothing of the kind and represented the political-economic program of a specific fraction of the capitalist class rather than a set of principles of "hands off the market." As individualist anarchist Kevin Carson summaries, "what is nostalgically called 'laissez-faire' was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidise accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline." [The Iron Fist behind the Invisible Hand] Moreover, there is the apparent unwillingness by such "free market" advocates (i.e. supporters of "free market" capitalism) to distinguish between historically and currently unfree capitalism and the other truly free market economy that they claim to desire. It is common to hear "anarcho"-capitalists point to the state-based capitalist system as vindication of their views (and even more surreal to see them point to pre-capitalist systems as examples of their ideology). It should be obvious that they cannot have it both ways.

In other words, Rothbard and other "anarcho"-capitalists treat capitalism as if it were the natural order of things rather than being the product of centuries of capitalist capture and use of state power to further their own interests. The fact that past uses of state power have allowed capitalist norms and assumptions to become the default system by their codification in property law and justified by bourgeois economic does not make it natural. The role of the state in the construction of a capitalist economy cannot be ignored or downplayed as government has always been an instrument in creating and developing such a system. As one critic of right-"libertarian" ideas put it, Rothbard "completely overlooks the role of the state in building and maintaining a capitalist economy in the West. Privileged to live in the twentieth century, long after the battles to establish capitalism have been fought and won, Rothbard sees the state solely as a burden on the market and a vehicle for imposing the still greater burden of socialism. He manifests a kind of historical nearsightedness that allows him to collapse many centuries of human experience into one long night of tyranny that ended only with the invention of the free market and its 'spontaneous' triumph over the past. It is pointless to argue, as Rothbard seems ready to do, that capitalism would have succeeded without the bourgeois state; the fact is that all capitalist nations have relied on the machinery of government to create and preserve the political and legal environments required by their economic system." That, of course, has not stopped him "critis[ing] others for being unhistorical." [Stephen L. Newman, Liberalism at Wit's End, pp. 77-8 and p. 79]

Thus we have a key contradiction within "anarcho"-capitalism. While they bemoan state intervention in the market, their underlying assumption is that it had no real effect on how society has evolved over the centuries. By a remarkable coincidence, the net effect of all this state intervention was to produce a capitalist economy identical in all features as one which would have been produced if society had been left alone to evolve naturally. It does seem strange that state violence would happen to produce the same economic system as that produced by right-"libertarians" and Austrian economists logically deducing concepts from a few basic axioms and assumptions. Even more of a coincidence, these conclusions also happen to be almost exactly the same as what those who have benefited from previous state coercion want to hear -- namely, the private property is good, trade unions and strikes are bad, that the state should not interfere with the power of the bosses and should not even think about helping the working class (employed or unemployed). As such, while their advice and rhetoric may have changed, the social role of economists has not. State action was required to dispossess the direct producers from the means of life (particularly the land) and to reduce the real wage of workers so that they have to provide regular work in a obedient manner. In this, it and the capitalists received much advice from the earliest economists as Marxist economic historian Michael Perelman documents in great detail. As he summarises, "classical political economy was concerned with promoting primitive accumulation in order to foster capitalist development, even though the logic of primitive accumulation was in direct conflict with the classical political economists' purported adherence to the values of laissez-faire." [The Invention of Capitalism, p. 12] The turn to "laissez-faire" was possible because direct state power could be mostly replaced by economic power to ensure the dependency of the working class.

Needless to say, some right-"libertarians" recognise that the state played some role in economic life in the rise and development of capitalism. So they contrast "bad" business people (who took state aid) and "good" ones (who did not). Thus Rothbard's comment that Marxists have "made no particular distinction between 'bourgeoisie' who made use of the state, and bourgeoisie who acted on the free market." [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 72] But such an argument is nonsense as it ignores the fact that the "free market" is a network (and defined by the state by the property rights it enforces). This means that state intervention in one part of the economy will have ramifications in other parts, particularly if the state action in question is the expropriation and/or protection of productive resources (land and workplaces) or the skewing of the labour market in favour of the bosses. In other words, the individualistic perspective of "anarcho"-capitalism blinds its proponents to the obvious collective nature of working class exploitation and oppression which flows from the collective and interconnected nature of production and investment in any real economy. State action supported by sectors of the capitalist class has, to use economic jargon, positive externalities for the rest. They, in general, benefit from it as a class just as working class people suffers from it collectively as it limits their available choices to those desired by their economic and political masters (usually the same people). As such, the right-"libertarian" fails to understand the class basis of state intervention.

For example, the owners of the American steel and other companies who grew rich and their companies big behind protectionist walls were obviously "bad" bourgeoisie. But were the bourgeoisie who supplied the steel companies with coal, machinery, food, "defence" and so on not also benefiting from state action? And the suppliers of the luxury goods to the wealthy steel company owners, did they not benefit from state action? Or the suppliers of commodities to the workers that laboured in the steel factories that the tariffs made possible, did they not benefit? And the suppliers to these suppliers? And the suppliers to these suppliers? Did not the users of technology first introduced into industry by companies protected by state orders also not benefit? Did not the capitalists who had a large pool of landless working class people to select from benefit from the "land monopoly" even though they may not have, unlike other capitalists, directly advocated it? It increased the pool of wage labour for all capitalists and increased their bargaining position/power in the labour market at the expense of the working class. In other words, such a policy helped maintain capitalist market power, irrespective of whether individual capitalists encouraged politicians to vote to create/maintain it. And, similarly, all American capitalists benefited from the changes in common law to recognise and protect capitalist private property and rights that the state enforced during the 19th century (see section B.2.5).

Rothbard, in other words, ignores class theft and the accumulative effect of stealing both productive property and the products of the workers who use it. He considered the "moral indignation" of socialism arose from the argument "that the capitalists have stolen the rightful property of the workers, and therefore that existing titles to accumulated capital are unjust." He argued that given "this hypothesis, the remainder of the impetus for both Marxism and anarchosyndicalism follow quite logically." However, Rothbard's "solution" to the problem of past force seems to be (essentially) a justification of existing property titles and not a serious attempt to understand or correct past initiations of force that have shaped society into a capitalist one and still shape it today. This is because he is simply concerned with returning property which has been obviously stolen and can be returned to those who have been directly dispossessed or their descendants (for example, giving land back to peasants or tenant farmers). If this cannot be done then the "title to that property, belongs properly, justly and ethically to its current possessors." [Op. Cit., p. 52 and p. 57] At best, he allows nationalised property and any corporation which has the bulk of its income coming from the state to be "homesteaded" by their workers (which, according to Rothbard's arguments for the end of Stalinism, means they will get shares in the company). The end result of his theory is to leave things pretty much as they are. This is because he could not understand that the exploitation of the working class was/is collective in nature and, as such, is simply impossible to redress it in his individualistic term of reference.

To take an obvious example, if the profits of slavery in the Southern states of America were used to invest in factories in the Northern states (as they were), does giving the land to the freed slaves in 1865 really signify the end of the injustice that situation produced? Surely the products of the slaves work were stolen property just as much as the land was and, as a result, so is any investment made from it? After all, investment elsewhere was based on the profits extracted from slave labour and "much of the profits earned in the northern states were derived from the surplus originating on the southern plantations." [Perelman, Op. Cit., p. 246] In terms of the wage workers in the North, they have been indirectly exploited by the existence of slavery as the investment this allowed reduced their bargaining power on the market as it reduced their ability to set up business for themselves by increasing the fixed costs of so doing. And what of the investment generated by the exploitation of these wage workers? As Mark Leier points out, the capitalists and landlords "may have purchased the land and machinery, but this money represented nothing more than the expropriated labour of others." [Bakunin, p. 111] If the land should be returned to those who worked it as Rothbard suggests, why not the industrial empires that were created on the backs of the generations of slaves who worked it? And what of the profits made from the generations of wage slaves who worked on these investments? And what of the investments which these profits allowed? Surely if the land should be given to those who worked it then so must any investments it generated? And assuming that those currently employed can rightly seize their workplaces, what about those previously employed and their descendants? Why should they be excluded from the riches their ancestors helped create?

To talk in terms of individuals misses all this and the net result is to ensure that the results of centuries of coercion and theft are undisturbed. This is because it is the working class as a whole who have been expropriated and whose labour has been exploited. The actual individuals involved and their descendants would be impossible to identify nor would it be possible to track down how the stolen fruits of their labour were invested. In this way, the class theft of our planet and liberty as well as the products of generations of working class people will continue safely.

Needless to say, some governments interfere in the economy more than others. Corporations do not invest in or buy from suppliers based in authoritarian regimes by accident. They do not just happen to be here, passively benefiting from statism and authoritarianism. Rather they choose between states to locate in based precisely on the cheapness of the labour supply. In other words, they prefer to locate in dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in Central America and Southeast Asia because those regimes interfere in the labour market the most -- while, of course, talking about the very "free market" and "economic liberty" those regimes deny to their subjects. For Rothbard, this seems to be just a coincidence or a correlation rather than systematic for the collusion between state and business is the fault, not of capitalism, but simply of particular capitalists. The system, in other words, is pure; only individuals are corrupt. But, for anarchists, the origins of the modern capitalist system lies not in the individual qualities of capitalists as such but in the dynamic and evolution of capitalism itself -- a complex interaction of class interest, class struggle, social defence against the destructive actions of the market, individual qualities and so forth. In other words, Rothbard's claims are flawed -- they fail to understand capitalism as a system, its dynamic nature and the authoritarian social relationships it produces and the need for state intervention these produce and require.

So, when the right suggests that "we" be "left alone," what they mean by "we" comes into clear focus when we consider how capitalism developed. Artisans and peasants were only "left alone" to starve (sometimes not even that, as the workhouse was invented to bring vagabonds to the joy of work), and the working classes of industrial capitalism were only "left alone" outside work and for only as long as they respected the rules of their "betters." As Marx memorably put it, the "newly freed men became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And this history, the history of their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire." [Op. Cit., p. 875] As for the other side of the class divide, they desired to be "left alone" to exercise their power over others as we will see. That modern "capitalism" is, in effect, a kind of "corporate mercantilism," with states providing the conditions that allow corporations to flourish (e.g. tax breaks, subsidies, bailouts, anti-labour laws, etc.) says more about the statist roots of capitalism than the ideologically correct definition of capitalism used by its supporters.

In fact, if we look at the role of the state in creating capitalism we could be tempted to rename "anarcho"-capitalism "marxian-capitalism". This is because, given the historical evidence, a political theory can be developed by which the "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie" is created and that this capitalist state "withers away" into "anarchy". That this means replacing the economic and social ideas of Marxism and their replacement by their direct opposite should not mean that we should reject the idea (after all, that is what "anarcho"-capitalism has done to Individualist Anarchism!). But we doubt that many "anarcho"-capitalists will accept such a name change (even though this would reflect their politics far better; after all they do not object to past initiations of force, just current ones and many do seem to think that the modern state will wither away due to market forces).

This is suggested by the fact that Rothbard did not advocate change from below as the means of creating "anarchy." He helped found the so-called Libertarian Party in 1971 which, like Marxists, stands for political office. With the fall of Stalinism in 1989, Rothbard faced whole economies which could be "homesteaded" and he argued that "desocialisation" (i.e., de-nationalisation as, like Leninists, he confused socialisation with nationalisation) "necessarily involves the action of that government surrendering its property to its private subjects . . . In a deep sense, getting rid of the socialist state requires that state to perform one final, swift, glorious act of self-immolation, after which it vanishes from the scene." (compare to Engels' comment that "the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society" is the state's "last independent act as a state." [Selected Works, p. 424]). He considered the "capital goods built by the State" as being "philosophically unowned" yet failed to note whose labour was exploited and taxed to build them in the first place (needless to say, he rejected the ideas of shares to all as this would be "egalitarian handouts . . . to undeserving citizens," presumably the ill, the unemployed, retirees, mothers, children, and future generations). [The Logic of Action II, p. 213, p. 212 and p. 209]

Industrial plants would be transferred to workers currently employed there, but not by their own direct action and direct expropriation. Rather, the state would do so. This is understandable as, left to themselves, the workers may not act quite as he desired. Thus we see him advocating the transfer of industry from the state bureaucracy to workers by means of "private, negotiable shares" as ownership was "not to be granted to collectives or co-operatives or workers or peasants holistically, which would only bring back the ills of socialism in a decentralised and chaotic syndicalist form." His "homesteading" was not to be done by the workers themselves rather it was a case of "granting shares to workers" by the state. He also notes that it should be a "priority" for the government "to return all stolen, confiscated property to its original owners, or to their heirs." This would involve "finding original landowners" -- i.e., the landlord class whose wealth was based on exploiting the serfs and peasants. [Op. Cit., p. 210 and pp. 211-2] Thus expropriated peasants would have their land returned but not, apparently, any peasants working land which had been taken from their feudal and aristocratic overlords by the state. Thus those who had just been freed from Stalinist rule would have been subjected to "libertarian" rule to ensure that the transition was done in the economically correct way. As it was, the neo-classical economists who did oversee the transition ensured that ownership and control transferred directly to a new ruling class rather than waste time issuing "shares" which would eventually end up in a few hands due to market forces (the actual way it was done could be considered a modern form of "primitive accumulation" as it ensured that capital goods did not end up in the hands of the workers).

But this is beside the point. The fact remains that state action was required to create and maintain capitalism. Without state support it is doubtful that capitalism would have developed at all. So the only "capitalism" that has existed is a product of state support and intervention, and it has been characterised by markets that are considerably less than free. Thus, serious supporters of truly free markets (like the American Individualist Anarchists) have not been satisfied with "capitalism" -- have, in fact, quite rightly and explicitly opposed it. Their vision of a free society has always been at odds with the standard capitalist one, a fact which "anarcho"-capitalists bemoan and dismiss as "mistakes" and/or the product of "bad economics." Apparently the net effect of all this state coercion has been, essentially, null. It has not, as the critics of capitalism have argued, fundamentally shaped the development of the economy as capitalism would have developed naturally by itself. Thus an economy marked by inequalities of wealth and power, where the bulk of the population are landless and resourceless and where interest, rent and profits are extracted from the labour of working people would have developed anyway regardless of the state coercion which marked the rise of capitalism and the need for a subservient and dependent working class by the landlords and capitalists which drove these policies simply accelerated the process towards "economic liberty." However, it is more than mere coincidence that capitalism and state coercion are so intertwined both in history and in current practice.

In summary, like other apologists for capitalism, right-wing "libertarians" advocate that system without acknowledging the means that were necessary to create it. They tend to equate it with any market system, failing to understand that it is a specific kind of market system where labour itself is a commodity. It is ironic, of course, that most defenders of capitalism stress the importance of markets (which have pre-dated capitalism) while downplaying the importance of wage labour (which defines it) along with the violence which created it. Yet as both anarchists and Marxists have stressed, money and commodities do not define capitalism any more than private ownership of the means of production. So it is important to remember that from a socialist perspective capitalism is not identical to the market. As we stressed in section C.2, both anarchists and Marxists argue that where people produce for themselves, is not capitalist production, i.e. when a worker sells commodities this is not capitalist production. Thus the supporters of capitalism fail to understand that a great deal of state coercion was required to transform pre-capitalist societies of artisans and peasant farmers selling the produce of their labour into a capitalist society of wage workers selling themselves to bosses, bankers and landlords.

Lastly, it should be stressed that this process of primitive accumulation is not limited to private capitalism. State capitalism has also had recourse to such techniques. Stalin's forced collectivisation of the peasantry and the brutal industrialisation involved in five-year plans in the 1930s are the most obvious example). What took centuries in Britain was condensed into decades in the Soviet Union and other state capitalist regimes, with a corresponding impact on its human toil. However, we will not discuss these acts of state coercion here as we are concerned primarily with the actions required to create the conditions required for private capitalism.

Needless to say, this section cannot hope to go into all the forms of state intervention across the globe which were used to create or impose capitalism onto an unwilling population. All we can do is provide a glimpse into the brutal history of capitalism and provide enough references for those interested to pursue the issue further. The first starting point should be Part VIII ("So-Called Primitive Accumulation") of volume 1 of Marx's Capital. This classic account of the origins of capitalism should be supplemented by more recent accounts, but its basic analysis is correct. Marxist writers have expanded on Marx's analysis, with Maurice Dobb's Studies in the Development of Capitalism and David McNally's Against the Market are worth consulting, as is Michael Perelman's The Invention of Capitalism. Kropotkin's Mutual Aid has a short summary of state action in destroying communal institutions and common ownership of land, as does his The State: It's Historic Role. Rudolf Rocker's Nationalism and Culture is also essential reading. Individualist Anarchist Kevin Carson's Studies in Mutualist Political Economy provides an excellent summary (see part 2, "Capitalism and the State: Past, Present and Future") as does his essay The Iron Fist behind the Invisible Hand.

Notes et references

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Difference between revisions of "FAQAnar:F.8 - Quel rÃ´le l'Ã‰tat a-t-il pris dans la crÃ©ation du capitalisme ?"

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