o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

More documents

Recommendations

Info

though they have a different ambience. Work might not be as regimented as prison life, but it is imposed like a prison sentence and workers believe it to be necessary and willingly spend the best part of their lives in burdensome jobs that turn them into automata. Black does not suppose that work, any more than time, has been created by the state. What he argues is that work is something that has arisen with the state’s development. And like other ideologies, work is considered a form of state power because it helps to maintain a condition that the state uses to justify its own existence. Most important, work supports and is supported by education or, as Zerzan defines it, ‘knowledge production’. In schools, children learn ‘that they are always being observed, monitored and evaluated’. 44 The apparent blandness of ideology thus describes the insidiousness of the state’s command of daily life. Returning to Rocker’s remark that power ‘is active consciousness of authority’, the table below summarizes the ways in which Kropotkin, Tolstoy, Zerzan and Perlman have encapsulated this relationship. Anarchist Conceptions of Authority and Power anarchist rejections of the state 63 Kropotkin Tolstoy Zerzan Perlman Authority Dependency Hypocrisy/ Commodification/ Psychological hypnosis objectification /cultural repression Power Law Armed force Ideological Nationalism abstraction Though anarchists have defined power and authority – and the violence it supports – differently, the relationship that anarchists posit between this triad forms the bedrock of their critiques of the state. The next section considers why anarchists reject the state: the first looks at the negativity of the state, and the second at its redundancy. anarchist critiques of the state It is possible to draw some of the grounds of the anarchists’ objections to the state from their definitions of government, authority
64 anarchism: a beginner’s guide and power. For example, anarchists variously claim that the state is immoral (breeding violence and aggression), repressive (stifling creativity), and inefficient (dampening local initiative). Anarchists have used all and any of these complaints to call for the state’s abolition. But perhaps the most persistent complaint is that the state is unjust. This claim turns on the charge that the state exists to maintain inequality and it has two aspects. Some anarchists argue that the state is exploitative, others that it is alienating. The idea that the state is an instrument of exploitation has two variants. The first, associated with individualists like Rothbard, is based on the coercive and parasitical nature of the state’s relationship with its citizens. According to this view, the state is a ‘vast engine of insitutionalized crime’ that steals property from individuals by threat of aggression. It’s a racket, little different from the Mafia. The second view, advanced by anarcho-communists and anarcho-syndicalists, extends from the observation of the class inequalities that government defends. In Kropotkin’s words, exploitation divides ‘mankind into two camps; the poor on the one side and on the other the idlers and the playboys with their fine worlds and brutal appetites’. 45 The London Anarchist Communist Federation provide a more recent account: Though capitalism is a global system of exploitation and banditry with huge multinational companies operating everywhere, the basis of it is quite simple. Basically, wealth is created by people who use tools to adapt the raw materials provided by nature. In order to survive, workers are forced to sell their labour (‘wage slavery’) at the market price. In their work, workers make the goods which are part of everyday life and provide services. However, the rewards workers receive in the form of wages are less than the value of the products and services they bring about. 46 On this understanding, exploitation is not straightforward extortion, as Rothbard would have it, but a form of cheating. Capitalists employ workers to produce goods that they can sell at a profit. To do this, they invent ways of lowering their production costs and maximizing worker productivity. Thus exploitation involves, on the one hand, low wages, investment in areas where labour is cheapest and deskilling (‘the McDonaldization of labour’) and, on the other, the mechanization of production, shift systems, the division of labour and the strict scheduling of production tasks (‘Taylorism’). In
Page 2 and 3:
anarchism a beginner’s guide
Page 4 and 5:
anarchism a beginner’s guide ruth
Page 6 and 7:
contents Acknowledgements vii intro
Page 8:
acknowledgements A number of people
Page 11 and 12:
2 anarchism: a beginner’s guide a
Page 13 and 14:
4 anarchism: a beginner’s guide r
Page 15 and 16:
6 anarchism: a beginner’s guide a
Page 17 and 18:
8 anarchism: a beginner’s guide w
Page 19 and 20:
10 anarchism: a beginner’s guide
Page 21 and 22: 12 anarchism: a beginner’s guide
Page 53 and 54: chapter two anarchist rejections of
Page 71: 62 anarchism: a beginner’s guide
Page 95 and 96: chapter three anarchy We have alway
Page 123 and 124:
Page 125 and 126:
Page 127 and 128:
Page 129 and 130:
Page 131 and 132:
Page 133 and 134:
Page 135 and 136:
Page 137 and 138:
Page 139 and 140:
Page 141 and 142:
Page 143 and 144:
Page 145 and 146:
Page 147 and 148:
Page 149 and 150:
Page 151 and 152:
Page 153 and 154:
Page 155 and 156:
Page 157 and 158:
Page 159 and 160:
Page 161 and 162:
Page 163 and 164:
Page 165 and 166:
Page 167 and 168:
Page 169 and 170:
Page 171 and 172:
Page 173 and 174:
Page 175 and 176:
Page 177 and 178:
Page 179 and 180:
chapter five concluding remarks Stu
Page 181 and 182:
Page 184 and 185:
index Page numbers in italic denote
Page 186 and 187:
index 177 Farrow, Lynne 119 fascism
Page 188 and 189:
index 179 and state 30, 45-6, 50, 5
show all

o_195qg5dto17o4rbc85q1ge61i84a.pdf

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?