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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