As previously noted (see section B.1), anarchists oppose all forms of hierarchical authority. Historically, however, the they have spent most of their time and energy opposing two main forms in particular. One is capitalism, the other, the state. These two forms of authority have a symbiotic relationship and cannot be easily separated. In this section, as well as explaining why anarchists oppose the state, we will necessarily have to analyse the relationship between it and capitalism.
So what is the state? As Malatesta put it, anarchists "have used the word State. . . to mean the sum total of the political, legislative, judiciary, military and financial institutions through which the management of their own affairs, the control over their personal behaviour, the responsibility for their personal safety, are taken away from the people and entrusted to others who, by usurption or delegation, are vested with the power to make laws for everything and everybody, and to oblige the people to observe them, if need be, by the use of collective force."
The government (or the state) "is made up of all governors. . . those who have the power to make laws regulating inter-human relations and to see that they are carried out. . . [and] who have the power. . . to make use of the social power, that is of the physical, intellectual and economic power of the whole community, in order to oblige everybody to carry out their wishes." [Anarchy, p. 13, pp. 15-16 -- see also Kropotkin's The State: Its Historic Role, p. 10]
This means that many, if not most, anarchists would agree with Randolph Bourne's characterisation of the state as the politico-military domination of a certain geographical territory by a ruling elite [see his "Unfinished Fragment on the State," in Untimely Papers, 1919]. On this subject Murray Bookchin writes:
"[m]inimally, the State is a professional system of social coercion. . . It is only when coercion is institutionalised into a professional, systematic and organised form of social control - . . . with the backing of a monopoly of violence - that we can properly speak of a State." [Remaking Society, p. 66]
Therefore, we can say that, for anarchists, the state is marked by three things:
Of these three aspects, the last one (its centralised, hierarchical nature) is the most important simply because the concentration of power into the hands of the few ensures a division of society into government and governed (which necessitates the creation of a professional body to enforce that division). Without such a division, we would not need a monopoly of violence and so would simply have an association of equals, unmarked by power and hierarchy (such as exists in many stateless "primitive" tribes).
Some types of states, e.g. Communist and social-democratic ones, are directly involved not only in politico-military domination but also in economic domination via state ownership of the means of production; whereas in liberal democratic capitalist states, such ownership is in the hands of private individuals. In liberal democratic states, however, the mechanisms of politico-military domination are controlled by and for a corporate elite, and hence the large corporations are often considered to belong to a wider "state-complex."
As the state is the delegation of power into the hands of the few, it is obviously based on hierarchy. This delegation of power results in the elected people becoming isolated from the mass of people who elected them and outside of their control. In addition, as those elected are given power over a host of different issues and told to decide upon them, a bureaucracy soon develops around them to aid in their decision-making. However, this bureaucracy, due to its control of information and its permanency, soon has more power than the elected officials. This means that those who serve the people's servant have more power than those they serve, just as the politician has more power than those who elected him. All forms of state-like (i.e. hierarchical) organisations inevitably spawn a bureaucracy about them. This bureaucracy soon becomes the de facto focal point of power in the structure, regardless of the official rules.
This marginalisation and disempowerment of ordinary people (and so the empowerment of a bureaucracy) is the key reason for anarchist opposition to the state. Such an arrangement ensures that the individual is disempowered, subject to bureaucratic, authoritarian rule which reduces the person to a object or a number, not a unique individual with hopes, dreams, thoughts and feelings. As Proudhon forcefully argued:
"To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so... To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorised, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolised, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown it all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality." [General Idea of the Revolution, p. 294]
Anarchists see the state, with its vast scope and control of deadly force, as the "ultimate" hierarchical structure, suffering from all the negative characteristics associated with authority described in the last section. Because of its centralised, hierarchical, and bureaucratic nature, the state becomes a great weight over society, restricting its growth and development and making popular control impossible. As Bakunin puts it:
"the so-called general interests of society supposedly represented by the State... [are] in reality... the general and permanent negation of the positive interests of the regions, communes, and associations, and a vast number of individuals subordinated to the State... [in which] all the best aspirations, all the living forces of a country, are sanctimoniously immolated and interred" [Michael Bakunin, The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 207].
In the rest of this section we will discuss the state, its role, its impact on a society's freedom and who benefits from its existence. Kropotkin's classic essay, The State: It's Historic Role is recommended for further reading on this subject.
The main function of the state is to enable the ruling elite to exploit
lower social strata, i.e. derive an economic surplus from them. The state,
to use Malatesta's words, is basically "the property owners' gendarme"
[Anarchy, p. 19] (compare to the maxim of the Founding Fathers of
American "democracy" -- "the people who own the country ought to govern
it" (John Jay)). Those in the upper-middle levels of the social pyramid
also frequently use the state to obtain income without working, as from
investments, but the elite gain by far the most economic advantages, which
is why in the US, one percent of the population controls over 40 percent
of total wealth. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that the state is
the extractive apparatus of society's parasites.
The state ensures the exploitative privileges of its ruling elite by
protecting certain economic monopolies from which its members derive their
wealth (see section B.3.2). This service is referred to as "protecting
private property" and is said to be one of the two main functions of the
state, the other being to ensure that individuals are "secure in their
persons." However, although this second aim is professed, in reality most
state laws and institutions are concerned with the protection of property
(for the anarchist definition of "property" see section B.3.1.).
From this fact we may infer that references to the "security of persons,"
"crime prevention," etc. are mostly rationalisations of the state's
existence and smokescreens for its perpetuation of elite power and
privileges. Moreover, even though the state does take a secondary interest
in protecting the security of persons (particularly elite persons), the
vast majority of crimes against persons are motivated by poverty and
alienation due to state-supported exploitation and also by the
desensitisation to violence created by the state's own violent methods of
protecting private property.
Hence, anarchists maintain that without the state and the crime-engendering
conditions to which it gives rise, it would be possible for decentralised,
voluntary community associations to deal compassionately (not punitively)
with the few incorrigibly violent people who might remain (see section
I.5.8).
It is clear that the state represents the essential coercive mechanisms by
which capitalism and the authority relations associated with private property
are sustained. As the economist Paul Sweezy expresses it:
"Property confers upon its owners freedom from labour and the disposal
over the labour of others, and this is the essence of all social domination
whatever form it may assume. It follows that the protection of property is
fundamentally the assurance of social domination to owners over non-owners.
And this in turn is precisely what is meant by class domination, which it
is the primary function of the state to uphold." [Theory of Capitalist
Development, pp. 243-44]
In other words, protecting private property and upholding class
domination are the same thing. Yet this primary function of the state is
disguised by the "democratic" facade of the representative electoral
system, through which it is made to appear that the people rule
themselves. Thus Bakunin writes that the modern state "unites in itself
the two conditions necessary for the prosperity of the capitalistic
economy: State centralisation and the actual subjection of. . . the
people. . . to the minority allegedly representing it but actually
governing it." [Op. Cit., p. 210]
The historian Charles Beard makes a similar point: "Inasmuch as the
primary object of a government, beyond mere repression of physical
violence, is the making of the rules which determine the property
relations of members of society, the dominant classes whose rights are
thus to be protected must perforce obtain from the government such rules
as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of
their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs of
government" [An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, quoted
by Howard Zinn, Op. Cit., p. 89].
This role of the state -- to protect capitalism -- was also noticed by Adam
Smith: "Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of
property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the
poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at
all" [Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, p. 71].
In a nutshell, the state is the means by which the ruling class rules.
Besides its primary function of protecting private property, the state
operates in other ways as an economic instrument of the ruling class.
First, the state intervenes in the modern economy to solve problems that
arise in the course of capitalist development. These interventions have
taken different forms in different times and include state funding for
industry (e.g. military spending); the creation of social infrastructure
too expensive for private capital to provide (railways, motorways);
tariffs to protect developing industries from more efficient international
competition (the key to successful industrialisation as it allows capitalists
to rip-off consumers, making them rich and increasing funds available for
investment); imperialist ventures to create colonies (or protect citizen's
capital invested abroad) in order to create markets or get access to raw
materials and cheap labour; government spending to stimulate consumer demand
in the face of underconsumption and stagnation; maintaining a "natural" level
of unemployment that can be used to discipline the working class, so ensuring
they produce more, for less; manipulating the money supply in order to reduce
the effects of the business cycle and undermine workers' gains in the class
struggle.
Second, because of the inordinate political power deriving from wealth
(see next section), capitalists use the state directly to benefit their
class, as from subsidies, tax breaks, government contracts, protective
tariffs, bailouts of corporations judged by state bureaucrats as too
important to let fail, and so on. And third, the state may be used to
grant concessions to the working class in cases where not doing so
would threaten the integrity of the system as a whole.
The example of state legislation to set the length of the working day is
an example of both the first and third functions enumerated above. In the
early period of capitalist development, a shortage of labour power led to
the state's ignoring the lengthening working day, thus allowing capitalists
to appropriate more surplus value from workers and increase the rate of
profit without interference. Later, however, after workers began to organise,
reducing the length of the working day became a key demand around which
revolutionary socialist fervour was developing. Hence, in order to defuse
this threat (and socialist revolution is the worst-case scenario for the
capitalist), the state passed legislation to reduce the length of the
working day (which, once workers' struggle calmed down, were happily ignored
and became "dead laws"). Initially, the state was functioning purely as
the protector of the capitalist class, using its powers to solve problems
that arise in the course of capitalist development (namely repressing the
labour movement to allow the capitalists to do as they liked). In the second
it was granting concessions to the working class to eliminate a threat to
the integrity of the system as a whole.
It should be noted that none of these three subsidiary functions implies
that capitalism can be changed through a series of piecemeal reforms into
a benevolent system that primarily serves working class interests. To the
contrary, as Sweezy rightly notes, these functions "grow out of and
supplement the basic principle that the state exists in the first instance
for the protection of capitalist property relations," which are the
foundation of the ruling class's ability to exploit. Therefore, "reforms may
modify the functioning of capitalism but never threaten its foundation."
[Op. Cit., p. 249] Ultimately, what the state concedes, it can also
take back (as was the case of the laws limiting the working day).
In other words, the state acts to protect the long-term interests of the
capitalist class as a whole (and ensure its own survival) by protecting
the system. This role can and does clash with the interests of particular
capitalists or even whole sections of the ruling class. But this conflict
does not change the role of the state as the property owners' policeman.
Indeed, the state can be considered as a means for settling (in a peaceful
and apparently independent manner) upper-class disputes over what to do to
keep the system going.
For simplicity, let's just consider the capitalist state, whose main
purpose is to protect the exploitative monopolies described below.
Because their economic monopolies are protected by the state, the elites
whose incomes are derived from them -- namely, finance capitalists,
industrial capitalists, and landlords -- are able to accumulate vast
wealth from those whom they exploit. This stratifies society into a
hierarchy of economic classes, with a huge disparity of wealth between the
small property-owning elite at the top and the non-property-owning
majority at the bottom.
Then, because it takes enormous wealth to win elections and lobby or bribe
legislators, the propertied elite are able to control the political
process -- and hence the state -- through the "power of the purse." For
example, it costs well over $20 million to run for President of the USA.
In other words, elite control of politics through huge wealth disparities
insures the continuation of such disparities and thus the continuation of
elite control. In this way the crucial political decisions of those at
the top are insulated from significant influence by those at the bottom.
Moreover, the ability of capital to disinvest (capital flight) and
otherwise adversely impact the economy is a powerful weapon to keep the
state as its servant. As Noam Chomsky notes:
"In capitalist democracy, the interests that must be satisfied are those of
capitalists; otherwise, there is no investment, no production, no work, no
resources to be devoted, however marginally, to the needs of the general
population" [Turning the Tide, p. 233]
Hence, even allegedly "democratic" capitalist states are in effect
dictatorships of the propertariat. Errico Malatesta put it this way:
"Even with universal suffrage - we could well say even more so with universal
suffrage - the government remained the bourgeoisie's servant and gendarme.
For were it to be otherwise with the government hinting that it might
take up a hostile attitude, or that democracy could ever be anything but
a pretence to deceive the people, the bourgeoisie, feeling its interests
threatened, would by quick to react, and would use all the influence and
force at its disposal, by reason of its wealth, to recall the government
to its proper place as the bourgeoisie's gendarme." [Anarchy, p. 20]
The existence of a state bureaucracy is a key feature in ensuring that the
state remains the ruling class's "policeman" and will be discussed in
greater detail in section B.2.5 - How does state centralisation affect
freedom? As far as economic forces go, we see their power implied when
the news report that changes in government, policies and law have been
"welcomed by the markets." As the richest 1% of households in America
(about 2 million adults) owned 35% of the stock owned by individuals in
1992 - with the top 10% owning over 81% - we can see that the "opinion"
of the markets actually means the power of the richest 1-5% of a
countries population (and their finance experts), power derived from
their control over investment and production. Given that the bottom 90%
of the US population has a smaller share (23%) of all kinds of investable
capital that the richest 1/2% (who own 29%), with stock ownership being
even more concentrated (the top 5% holding 95% of all shares), its obvious
why Doug Henwood (author of Wall Street) argues that stock markets
are "a way for the very rich as a class to own an economy's productive
capital stock as a whole" and are a source of "political power" and a way
to have influence over government policy. [Wall Street: Class Racket]
Of course, this does not mean that the state and the capitalist class
always see "eye to eye." Top politicians, for example, are part of the
ruling elite, but they are in competition with other parts of it. In
addition, different sectors of the capitalist class are competing against
each other for profits, political influence, privileges, etc. As such, the
state is often in conflict with sections of the capitalist class, just
as sections of that class use the state to advance their own interests
within the general framework of protecting the capitalist system (i.e.
the interests of the ruling class as a class). Such conflicts sometimes
give the impression of the state being a "neutral" body, but this is an
illusion -- it exists to defend class power and privilege, and to resolve
disputes within that class peacefully via the "democratic" process (within
which we get the chance of picking the representatives of the elite who
will oppress us least).
Nevertheless, without the tax money from successful businesses, the state
would be weakened. Hence the role of the state is to ensure the best
conditions for capital as a whole, which means that, when necessary,
it can and does work against the interests of certain parts of the
capitalist class. This is what can give the state the appearance of
independence and can fool people into thinking that it represents the
interests of society as a whole. (For more on the ruling elite and its
relation to the state, see C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite [Oxford,
1956]; cf. Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society [Basic Books,
1969] and Divided Societies [Oxford, 1989]; G. William Domhoff, Who
Rules America? [Prentice Hall, 1967]; Who Rules America Now? A View
for the '80s [Touchstone, 1983] and Toxic Sludge is Good For You! Lies, Damn
Lies and the Public Relations Industry by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
[Common Courage Press, 1995]).
It's a common but false idea that voting every four or so years to elect
the public face of a highly centralised and bureaucratic machine means
that ordinary people control the state. Obviously, to say that this idea
is false does not imply that there is no difference between a liberal
republic and a fascistic or monarchical state. Far from it.
The vote is an important victory wrested from the powers that be. It is one
small step on the road to libertarian socialism. Nevertheless, all forms of
hierarchy, even those in which the top officers are elected are marked by
authoritarianism and centralism. Power is concentrated in the centre (or
at the "top"), which means that society becomes "a heap of dust animated
from without by a subordinating, centralist idea" [P.J. Proudhon, quoted
by Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia, p. 29]. For, once elected, top officers
can do as they please, and in all political bureaucracies, many important
decisions are made by non-elected staff.
Centralism makes democracy meaningless, as political decision-making is
given over to professional politicians in remote capitals. Lacking local
autonomy, people are isolated from each other (atomised) by having no
political forum where they can come together to discuss, debate, and
decide among themselves the issues they consider important. Elections
are not based on natural, decentralised groupings and thus cease to be
relevant. The individual is just another "voter" in the mass, a political
"constituent" and nothing more. The amorphous basis of modern, statist
elections "aims at nothing less than to abolish political life in towns,
communes and departments, and through this destruction of all municipal
and regional autonomy to arrest the development of universal suffrage"
[Op. Cit.]. Thus people are disempowered by the very structures that
claim to allow them to express themselves.
As intended, isolated people are no threat to the powers that be. This
process of marginalisation can be seen from American history, for example,
when town meetings were replaced by elected bodies, with the citizens
being placed in passive, spectator roles as mere "voters" (see section B.5
"Is capitalism empowering and based on human action?"). Being an atomised
voter is hardly an ideal notion of "freedom," despite the rhetoric of
politicians about the virtues of a "free society" and "The Free World" --
as if voting once every four or five years could ever be classed as
"liberty" or even "democracy."
In this way, social concern and power are taken away from ordinary
citizens and centralised in the hands of the few. Marginalisation of the
people is the key control mechanism in the state and authoritarian
organisations in general. Considering the European Community (EC), for
example, we find that the "mechanism for decision-making between EC states
leaves power in the hands of officials (from Interior ministries, police,
immigration, customs and security services) through a myriad of working
groups. Senior officials. . . play a critical role in ensuring agreements
between the different state officials. The EC Summit meetings, comprising
the 12 Prime Ministers, simply rubber-stamp the conclusions agreed by the
Interior and Justice Ministers. It is only then, in this intergovernmental
process, that parliaments and people are informed (and them only with the
barest details)." [Tony Bunyon, Statewatching the New Europe, p. 39]
As well as economic pressures from elites, governments also face pressures
within the state itself due to the bureaucracy that comes with centralism.
There is a difference between the state and government. The state is the
permanent collection of institutions that have entrenched power structures
and interests. The government is made up of various politicians. It's the
institutions that have power in the state due to their permanence, not the
representatives who come and go. As Clive Ponting (an ex-civil servant
himself) indicates, "the function of a political system in any country...
is to regulate, but not to alter radically, the existing economic structure
and its linked power relationships. The great illusion of politics is that
politicians have the ability to make whatever changes they like..."
[quoted in Alternatives, no.5, p. 19].
Therefore, as well as marginalising the people, the state also ends up
marginalising "our" representatives. As power rests not in the elected
bodies, but in a bureaucracy, popular control becomes increasingly
meaningless. As Bakunin pointed out, "liberty can be valid only
when...[popular] control [of the state] is valid. On the contrary, where
such control is fictitious, this freedom of the people likewise becomes a
mere fiction" [The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, p. 212].
This means that state centralism can become a serious source of danger to
the liberty and well-being of most of the people under it. However, some
people do benefit from state centralisation, namely those with power who
desire to be "left alone" to use it: that is, the two sections of the
ruling elite, bureaucrats of capital and state (as will be discussed
further in the next section).
B.2.1 What is main function of the state?
B.2.2 Does the state have subsidiary functions?
B.2.3 How does the ruling class maintain control of the state?
B.2.4 How does state centralisation affect freedom?