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Anarchists in Lockdown
As everybody knows, anarchists oppose the state. All states dictate. Don’t vote — only a politician gets in. The police are not your friends. Giving it a Marxist twist, the state is the executive of the ruling class. I get the impression that it has been difficult for anarchists to be totally on song with this approach lately. We seem to owe our lives to authoritarian state diktats — we are relying on the lockdowns to contain the virus. At the same time there are aspects of current state policy that might concern anyone on the left. The current situation makes it clear that with popular support, it is possible for the state to close off almost all avenues for free association. There are the awful bungles of state ineptitude and the targeting of marginal groups with heavy handed policing.
Weber defines the state as a body that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. That has always seemed a bit odd to me. It implies a consensus on state violence. But this is not always the case. Perhaps it might be better to say that states have an effective monopoly over violence. In Marx’s writing, the state is the executive of the ruling class. It is an organ through which the ruling class controls the subordinate classes. So, in a fully realized communism the state will not be necessary. This fits with the anarchist view of things. It has always puzzled anarchists that Marxists have nevertheless believed in the necessity to maintain a state after the revolution.
There is a lot going for Marx’s view that a state is the executive of the ruling class. In capitalism, it is the state that enforces the ownership of private property and enables market transactions by enforcing contracts. The state penalizes those who default on their debts, chucks tenants out when they don’t pay the rent, arrests shop lifters. The nuts and bolts that actually allow capitalists to control the means of production. Anarchists envisage a post-class society as one that does not have a state. If people need to use violence to enforce popular ownership, this is to be handled by citizen militias. In an anarchist utopia there is no national body with a legitimate right to command the whole population through the threat of violence.
I agree with all of this. But what gets left out are some other aspects of the way the state operates in capitalism. Cardan has the best explanation of this situation. Capitalism is unique in class societies. Ruling class ownership of the means of production is individualized, parcelled out into chunks of property that can be bought and sold on the market. The way to retain a share of the means of production is to put products on the market and sell lots of them. The effect is competition. To succeed, you need the best technology — to get the most saleable product and to get the most out of resources and labour. This competitive pressure drives the technological complexity and constant technological change that is the hallmark of capitalism. This gives a degree of power to ordinary people that is almost completely absent in previous class societies. The willing and engaged participation of ordinary people at work is necessary to put this technological complexity into operation. Capitalist society, even in its Soviet versions, is a balance of forces between the subordinate classes and the ruling class. Cooperation is achieved through some accommodations to the demands of the subordinate classes. For example, ever-increasing consumption of high-tech goodies compensates the subordinate classes for a life of alienated labour.
States in capitalist society represent this balance of forces as an index of the state of play. The enforcement that they enact on the population at large is two sided. An implementation of the capitalist ownership of the means of production. A consolidation of the victories of the subordinate classes. Marx looks at the struggle for the ten-hour day. By enacting this as policy, the state forces the capitalist class to limit the exploitation of their workers. Welfare states have provided for medical services, free education, public housing, unemployment benefits and pensions, national parks. In retrospect you might well say that capitalism has done quite well out of all of this — by ensuring a competent and well-informed workforce. But this is to look at things with the benefit of hindsight. None of these reforms were welcomed by the capitalist class. They accepted them as the lesser evil in a situation where there was always a very real threat of revolution. Each one of these reforms is cemented in place by the sanctions that the state can employ through its monopoly on violence.
It is on account of this complex situation that you have to look at state policies in late capitalism on their merits. Given that there is a body with an effective monopoly on violence it cannot be assumed that everything it does is against the interests of the subordinate classes. In the case of Covid, ruling class interests are divided. Some want the lockdowns to end so they can get back to making money. Others believe that the most secure economic future will only come about if we can get on top of this illness and restore confidence. From the point of view of the population, the lockdowns are the only way to stop some people from taking risks that are going to impact on the rest of us. There are plenty of economic motives for taking risks, given the way that economic security depends on employment. There is no alternative body of enforcers available to us ordinary people to stop risky behaviour. We are stuck with a situation in which the lockdown enforcement enacted by the police is necessary, given the absence of viable alternatives.
There is one way in which anarchists are totally right about the state. There could be no state in an anarchist utopia. This is because alienated labour, the ownership of the means of production by a ruling class, and the enforcement of their rule through the state are part of a package.
How does a state work to get an effective monopoly of violence? They pay a body of armed enforcers who carry out the commands of the state regardless of their own views. Not too different to any kind of job in a class society really. The situation that enables this command structure to work is what Marxists call ‘alienated labour’. People do what they are told at work because there is no other way to get access to the material goodies that you need to live. The ruling class own the vast bulk of the means of production that make material things — food, housing, clothes and so on. In class societies it was ever thus.
A classless society is one in which there is no alienated labour and ordinary people are in complete control of the means of production which they are using. They also get to say how these goods and services that they produce are to be distributed. If you wanted to set up a state under these conditions, it could never work. The body of enforcers could not be paid from state coffers, with no money being used in the economy at large. There would be no compulsion on any such group of intended enforcers to do what the state commanded. Their livelihoods would be provided for in the same way as everyone else in a classless society. By a patchwork of voluntary groups producing things and allocating them to particular members of the community. An executive aspiring to act like a state would have no leverage to set up a monopoly of violence by commanding a group of enforcers to do their bidding. This is the hidden truth of the anarchist critique of the state.