        F.8 What role did the state take in the creation of capitalism?

   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 --
   [1]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 [2]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 [3]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.

F.8.1 What social forces lay behind the rise of capitalism?

   Capitalist society is a relatively recent development. For Marx, while
   markets have existed for millennium "the capitalist era dates from the
   sixteenth century." [Capital, vol. 1, p. 876] As Murray Bookchin
   pointed out, for a "long era, perhaps spanning more than five
   centuries," capitalism "coexisted with feudal and simple commodity
   relationships" in Europe. He argues that this period "simply cannot be
   treated as 'transitional' without reading back the present into the
   past." [From Urbanisation to Cities, p. 179] In other words, capitalism
   was not a inevitable outcome of "history" or social evolution.

   Bookchin went on to note that capitalism existed "with growing
   significance in the mixed economy of the West from the fourteenth
   century up to the seventeenth" but that it "literally exploded into
   being in Europe, particularly England, during the eighteenth and
   especially nineteenth centuries." [Op. Cit., p. 181] The question
   arises, what lay behind this "growing significance"? Did capitalism
   "explode" due to its inherently more efficient nature or where there
   other, non-economic, forces at work? As we will show, it was most
   definitely the second -- capitalism was born not from economic forces
   but from the political actions of the social elites which its usury
   enriched. Unlike artisan (simple commodity) production, wage labour
   generates inequalities and wealth for the few and so will be selected,
   protected and encouraged by those who control the state in their own
   economic and social interests.

   The development of capitalism in Europe was favoured by two social
   elites, the rising capitalist class within the degenerating medieval
   cities and the absolutist state. The medieval city was "thoroughly
   changed by the gradual increase in the power of commercial capital, due
   primarily to foreign trade . . . By this the inner unity of the commune
   was loosened, giving place to a growing caste system and leading
   necessarily to a progressive inequality of social interests. The
   privileged minorities pressed ever more definitely towards a
   centralisation of the political forces of the community. . .
   Mercantilism in the perishing city republics led logically to a demand
   for larger economic units [i.e. to nationalise the market]; and by this
   the desire for stronger political forms was greatly strengthened . . .
   Thus the city gradually became a small state, paving the way for the
   coming national state." [Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, p. 94]
   Kropotkin stressed that in this destruction of communal
   self-organisation the state not only served the interests of the rising
   capitalist class but also its own. Just as the landlord and capitalist
   seeks a workforce and labour market made up of atomised and isolated
   individuals, so does the state seek to eliminate all potential rivals
   to its power and so opposes "all coalitions and all private societies,
   whatever their aim." [The State: It's Historic role, p. 53]

   The rising economic power of the proto-capitalists conflicted with that
   of the feudal lords, which meant that the former required help to
   consolidate their position. That aid came in the form of the
   monarchical state which, in turn, needed support against the feudal
   lords. With the force of absolutism behind it, capital could start the
   process of increasing its power and influence by expanding the "market"
   through state action. This use of state coercion was required because,
   as Bookchin noted, "[i]n every pre-capitalist society, countervailing
   forces . . . existed to restrict the market economy. No less
   significantly, many pre-capitalist societies raised what they thought
   were insuperable obstacles to the penetration of the State into social
   life." He noted the "power of village communities to resist the
   invasion of trade and despotic political forms into society's abiding
   communal substrate." State violence was required to break this
   resistance and, unsurprisingly the "one class to benefit most from the
   rising nation-state was the European bourgeoisie . . . This structure .
   . . provided the basis for the next great system of labour
   mobilisation: the factory." [The Ecology of Freedom, pp. 207-8 and p.
   336] The absolutist state, noted Rocker, "was dependent upon the help
   of these new economic forces, and vice versa and so it "at first
   furthered the plans of commercial capital" as its coffers were filled
   by the expansion of commerce. Its armies and fleets "contributed to the
   expansion of industrial production because they demanded a number of
   things for whose large-scale production the shops of small tradesmen
   were no longer adapted. Thus gradually arose the so-called
   manufactures, the forerunners of the later large industries." [Op.
   Cit., pp. 117-8] As such, it is impossible to underestimate the role of
   state power in creating the preconditions for both agricultural and
   industrial capitalism.

   Some of the most important state actions from the standpoint of early
   industry were the so-called Enclosure Acts, by which the "commons" --
   the free farmland shared communally by the peasants in most rural
   villages -- was "enclosed" or incorporated into the estates of various
   landlords as private property (see [4]section F.8.3). This ensured a
   pool of landless workers who had no option but to sell their labour to
   landlords and capitalists. Indeed, the widespread independence caused
   by the possession of the majority of households of land caused the
   rising class of capitalists to complain, as one put it, "that men who
   should work as wage-labourers cling to the soil, and in the naughtiness
   of their hearts prefer independence as squatters to employment by a
   master." [quoted by Allan Engler, The Apostles of Greed, p. 12] Once in
   service to a master, the state was always on hand to repress any signs
   of "naughtiness" and "independence" (such as strikes, riots, unions and
   the like). For example, Seventeenth century France saw a "number of
   decrees . . . which forbade workers to change their employment or which
   prohibited assemblies of workers or strikes on pain of corporal
   punishment or even death. (Even the Theological Faculty of the
   University of Paris saw fit to pronounce solemnly against the sin of
   workers' organisation)." [Maurice Dobb, Studies in Capitalism
   Development, p. 160]

   In addition, other forms of state aid ensured that capitalist firms got
   a head start, so ensuring their dominance over other forms of work
   (such as co-operatives). A major way of creating a pool of resources
   that could be used for investment was the use of mercantilist policies
   which used protectionist measures to enrich capitalists and landlords
   at the expense of consumers and their workers. For example, one of most
   common complaints of early capitalists was that workers could not turn
   up to work regularly. Once they had worked a few days, they disappeared
   as they had earned enough money to live on. With higher prices for
   food, caused by protectionist measures, workers had to work longer and
   harder and so became accustomed to factory labour. In addition,
   mercantilism allowed native industry to develop by barring foreign
   competition and so allowed industrialists to reap excess profits which
   they could then use to increase their investments. In the words of
   Marxist economic historian Maurice Dobb:

     "In short, the Mercantile System was a system of State-regulated
     exploitation through trade which played a highly important rule in
     the adolescence of capitalist industry: it was essentially the
     economic policy of an age of primitive accumulation." [Op. Cit., p.
     209]

   As Rocker summarises, "when absolutism had victoriously overcome all
   opposition to national unification, by its furthering of mercantilism
   and economic monopoly it gave the whole social evolution a direction
   which could only lead to capitalism." [Op. Cit., pp. 116-7]

   Mercantilist policies took many forms, including the state providing
   capital to new industries, exempting them from guild rules and taxes,
   establishing monopolies over local, foreign and colonial markets, and
   granting titles and pensions to successful capitalists. In terms of
   foreign trade, the state assisted home-grown capitalists by imposing
   tariffs, quotas, and prohibitions on imports. They also prohibited the
   export of tools and technology as well as the emigration of skilled
   workers to stop competition (this applied to any colonies a specific
   state may have had). Other policies were applied as required by the
   needs of specific states. For example, the English state imposed a
   series of Navigation Acts which forced traders to use English ships to
   visit its ports and colonies (this destroyed the commerce of Holland,
   its chief rival). Nor should the impact of war be minimised, with the
   demand for weapons and transportation (including ships) injecting
   government spending into the economy. Unsurprisingly, given this
   favouring of domestic industry at the expense of its rivals and the
   subject working class population the mercantilist period was one of
   generally rapid growth, particularly in England.

   As we discussed in [5]section C.10, some kind of mercantilism has
   always been required for a country to industrialise. Over all, as
   economist Paul Ormerod puts it, the "advice to follow pure free-market
   polices seems . . . to be contrary to the lessons of virtually the
   whole of economic history since the Industrial Revolution . . . every
   country which has moved into . . . strong sustained growth . . . has
   done so in outright violation of pure, free-market principles." These
   interventions include the use of "tariff barriers" to protect infant
   industries, "government subsidies" and "active state intervention in
   the economy." He summarises: "The model of entrepreneurial activity in
   the product market, with judicious state support plus repression in the
   labour market, seems to be a good model of economic development." [The
   Death of Economics, p. 63]

   Thus the social forces at work creating capitalism was a combination of
   capitalist activity and state action. But without the support of the
   state, it is doubtful that capitalist activity would have been enough
   to generate the initial accumulation required to start the economic
   ball rolling. Hence the necessity of Mercantilism in Europe and its
   modified cousin of state aid, tariffs and "homestead acts" in America.

F.8.2 What was the social context of the statement "laissez-faire?"

   The honeymoon of interests between the early capitalists and autocratic
   kings did not last long. "This selfsame monarchy, which for weighty
   reasons sought to further the aims of commercial capital and was. . .
   itself aided in its development by capital, grew at last into a
   crippling obstacle to any further development of European industry."
   [Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, p. 117]

   This is the social context of the expression "laissez-faire" -- a
   system which has outgrown the supports that protected it in its early
   stages. Just as children eventually rebel against the protection and
   rules of their parents, so the capitalists rebelled against the
   over-bearing support of the absolutist state. Mercantilist policies
   favoured some industries and harmed the growth of others. The rules and
   regulations imposed upon those it did favour reduced the flexibility of
   capitalists to changing environments. As Rocker argues, "no matter how
   the absolutist state strove, in its own interest, to meet the demands
   of commerce, it still put on industry countless fetters which became
   gradually more and more oppressive . . . [it] became an unbearable
   burden . . . which paralysed all economic and social life." [Op. Cit.,
   p. 119] All in all, mercantilism became more of a hindrance than a help
   and so had to be replaced. With the growth of economic and social power
   by the capitalist class, this replacement was made easier. As Errico
   Malatesta notes:

     "The development of production, the vast expansion of commerce, the
     immeasurable power assumed by money . . . have guaranteed this
     supremacy [of economic power over political power] to the capitalist
     class which, no longer content with enjoying the support of the
     government, demanded that government arise from its own ranks. A
     government which owed its origin to the right of conquest . . .
     though subject by existing circumstances to the capitalist class,
     went on maintaining a proud and contemptuous attitude towards its
     now wealthy former slaves, and had pretensions to independence of
     domination. That government was indeed the defender, the property
     owners' gendarme, but the kind of gendarmes who think they are
     somebody, and behave in an arrogant manner towards the people they
     have to escort and defend, when they don't rob or kill them at the
     next street corner; and the capitalist class got rid of it . . . and
     replac[ed] it by a government of its own choosing, at all times
     under its control and specifically organised to defend that class
     against any possible demands by the disinherited." [Anarchy, pp.
     22-3]

   Malatesta here indicates the true meaning of "leave us alone," or
   "laissez-faire." The absolutist state (not "the state" per se) began to
   interfere with capitalists' profit-making activities and authority, so
   they determined that it had to go -- which the rising capitalist class
   did when they utilised such popular movements as the English, French
   and American revolutions. In such circumstances, when the state is not
   fully controlled by the capitalist class, then it makes perfect sense
   to oppose state intervention no matter how useful it may have been in
   the past -- a state run by aristocratic and feudal landlords does not
   produce class legislation in quite the right form. That changes when
   members of the capitalist class hold state power and when the landlords
   start acting more like rural capitalists and, unsurprisingly,
   laissez-faire was quickly modified and then abandoned once capitalists
   could rely on a capitalist state to support and protect its economic
   power within society.

   When capitalism had been rid of unwanted interference by the hostile
   use of state power by non-capitalist classes then laissez-faire had its
   utility (just as it has its utility today when attacking social
   welfare). Once this had been accomplished then state intervention in
   society was encouraged and applauded by capitalists. "It is ironic that
   the main protagonists of the State, in its political and administrative
   authority, were the middle-class Utilitarians, on the other side of
   whose Statist banner were inscribed the doctrines of economic Laissez
   Faire." [E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 90]
   Capitalists simply wanted capitalist states to replace monarchical
   states, so that heads of government would follow state economic
   policies regarded by capitalists as beneficial to their class as a
   whole. And as development economist Lance Taylor argues:

     "In the long run, there are no laissez-faire transitions to modern
     economic growth. The state has always intervened to create a
     capitalist class, and then it has to regulate the capitalist class,
     and then the state has to worry about being taken over by the
     capitalist class, but the state has always been there." [quoted by
     Noam Chomsky, Year 501, p. 104]

   In order to attack mercantilism, the early capitalists had to ignore
   the successful impact of its policies in developing industry and a
   "store of wealth" for future economic activity. As William Lazonick
   points out, "the political purpose of [Adam Smith's] the Wealth of
   Nations was to attack the mercantilist institutions that the British
   economy had built up over the previous two hundred years. Yet in
   proposing institutional change, Smith lacked a dynamic historical
   analysis. In his attack on these institutions, Smith might have asked
   why the extent of the world market available to Britain in the late
   eighteenth century was so uniquely under British control. If Smith had
   asked this 'big question,' he might have been forced to grant credit
   for Britain's extent of the world market to the very mercantilist
   institutions he was attacking." Moreover, he "might have recognised the
   integral relation between economic and political power in the rise of
   Britain to international dominance." Overall, "[w]hat the British
   advocates of laissez-faire neglected to talk about was the role that a
   system of national power had played in creating conditions for Britain
   to embark on its dynamic development path . . . They did not bother to
   ask how Britain had attained th[e] position [of 'workshop of the
   world'], while they conveniently ignored the on going system of
   national power -- the British Empire -- that . . . continued to support
   Britain's position." [Business Organisation and the Myth of the Market
   Economy, p. 2, p. 3 and p.5]

   Similar comments are applicable to American supporters of laissez faire
   who fail to notice that the "traditional" American support for
   world-wide free trade is quite a recent phenomenon. It started only at
   the end of the Second World War (although, of course, within America
   military Keynesian policies were utilised). While American industry was
   developing, the state and capitalist class had no time for
   laissez-faire (see [6]section F.8.5 for details). After it had grown
   strong, the United States began preaching laissez-faire to the rest of
   the world -- and began to kid itself about its own history, believing
   its slogans about laissez-faire as the secret of its success. Yet like
   all other successful industrialisers, the state could aid capitalists
   directly and indirectly (via tariffs, land policy, repression of the
   labour movement, infrastructure subsidy and so on) and it would "leave
   them alone" to oppress and exploit workers, exploit consumers, build
   their industrial empires and so forth.

   Takis Fotopoules indicates that the social forces at work in "freeing"
   the market did not represent a "natural" evolution towards freedom:

     "Contrary to what liberals and Marxists assert, marketisation of the
     economy was not just an evolutionary process, following the
     expansion of trade under mercantilism . . . modern [i.e. capitalist]
     markets did not evolve out of local markets and/or markets for
     foreign goods . . . the nation-state, which was just emerging at the
     end of the Middle Ages, played a crucial role creating the
     conditions for the 'nationalisation' of the market . . . and . . .
     by freeing the market from effective social control." ["The
     Nation-state and the Market", pp. 37-80 Society and Nature, Vol. 2,
     No. 2, pp. 44-45]

   The "freeing" of the market means freeing those who "own" most of the
   market (i.e. the wealthy elite) from "effective social control," but
   the rest of society was not as lucky. Kropotkin makes a similar point:
   "While giving the capitalist any degree of free scope to amass his
   wealth at the expense of the helpless labourers, the government has
   nowhere and never . . . afforded the labourers the opportunity 'to do
   as they pleased'." [Anarchism, p. 182]

   So, the expression "laissez-faire" dates from the period when
   capitalists were objecting to the restrictions that helped create them
   in the first place. It has little to do with freedom as such and far
   more to do with the needs of capitalist power and profits. It should
   also be remembered that at this time the state was run by the rich and
   for the rich. Elections, where they took place, involved the wealthiest
   of male property owners. This meant there were two aspects in the call
   for laissez-faire. On the one hand, by the elite to eliminate
   regulations and interventions they found burdensome and felt
   unnecessary as their social position was secure by their economic power
   (mercantilism evolved into capitalism proper when market power was
   usually sufficient to produce dependency and obedience as the working
   class had been successfully dispossessed from the land and the means of
   production). On the other, serious social reformers (like Adam Smith)
   who recognised that the costs of such elite inspired state regulations
   generally fell on working class people. The moral authority of the
   latter was used to bolster the desire of the former to maximise their
   wealth by imposing costs of others (workers, customers, society and the
   planet's eco-system) with the state waiting in the wings to support
   them as and when required.

   Unsurprising, working class people recognised the hypocrisy of this
   arrangement (even if most modern-day right-"libertarians" do not and
   provide their services justifying the actions and desires of repressive
   and exploitative oligarchs seeking monopolistic positions). They turned
   to political and social activism seeking to change a system which saw
   economic and political power reinforce each other. Some (like the
   Chartists and Marxists) argued for political reforms to generalise
   democracy into genuine one person, one vote. In this way, political
   liberty would be used to end the worse excesses of so-called "economic
   liberty" (i.e., capitalist privilege and power). Others (like
   mutualists) aimed at economic reforms which ensure that the capitalist
   class would be abolished by means of genuine economic freedom. Finally,
   most other anarchists argued that revolutionary change was required as
   the state and capitalism were so intertwined that both had to be ended
   at the same time. However, the struggle against state power always came
   from the general population. As Murray Bookchin argued, it is an error
   to depict this "revolutionary era and its democratic aspirations as
   'bourgeois,' an imagery that makes capitalism a system more committed
   to freedom, or even ordinary civil liberties, than it was
   historically." [From Urbanisation to Cities, p. 180f] While the
   capitalist class may have benefited from such popular movements as the
   English, American and French revolutions but these revolutions were not
   led, never mind started or fought, by the bourgeoisie.

   Not much as changed as capitalists are today seeking maximum freedom
   from the state to ensure maximum authority over their wage slaves and
   society. The one essential form of support the "Libertarian" right
   wants the state (or "defence" firms) to provide capitalism is the
   enforcement of property rights -- the right of property owners to "do
   as they like" on their own property, which can have obvious and
   extensive social impacts. What "libertarian" capitalists object to is
   attempts by others -- workers, society as a whole, the state, etc. --
   to interfere with the authority of bosses. That this is just the
   defence of privilege and power (and not freedom) has been discussed in
   [7]section B and elsewhere in [8]section F, so we will not repeat
   ourselves here. Samuel Johnson once observed that "we hear the loudest
   yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes." [quoted by Noam
   Chomsky, Year 501, p. 141] Our modern "libertarian" capitalist drivers
   of wage-slaves are yelping for exactly the same kind of "liberty."

F.8.3 What other forms did state intervention in creating capitalism take?

   Beyond being a paymaster for new forms of production and social
   relations as well as defending the owners' power, the state intervened
   economically in other ways as well. As we noted in [9]section B.2.5,
   the state played a key role in transforming the law codes of society in
   a capitalistic fashion, ignoring custom and common law when it was
   convenient to do so. Similarly, the use of tariffs and the granting of
   monopolies to companies played an important role in accumulating
   capital at the expense of working people, as did the breaking of unions
   and strikes by force.

   However, one of the most blatant of these acts was the enclosure of
   common land. In Britain, by means of the Enclosure Acts, land that had
   been freely used by poor peasants was claimed by large landlords as
   private property. As socialist historian E.P. Thompson summarised, "the
   social violence of enclosure consisted . . . in the drastic, total
   imposition upon the village of capitalist property-definitions." [The
   Making of the English Working Class, pp. 237-8] Property rights, which
   favoured the rich, replaced the use rights and free agreement that had
   governed peasants use of the commons. Unlike use rights, which rest in
   the individual, property rights require state intervention to create
   and maintain. "Parliament and law imposed capitalist definitions to
   exclusive property in land," Thompson notes. This process involved
   ignoring the wishes of those who used the commons and repressing those
   who objected. Parliament was, of course, run by and for the rich who
   then simply "observed the rules which they themselves had made."
   [Customs in Common, p. 163]

   Unsurprisingly, many landowners would become rich through the enclosure
   of the commons, heaths and downland while many ordinary people had a
   centuries old right taken away. Land enclosure was a gigantic swindle
   on the part of large landowners. In the words of one English folk poem
   written in 1764 as a protest against enclosure:

                   They hang the man, and flog the woman,
                 That steals the goose from off the common;
                     But let the greater villain loose,
                   That steals the common from the goose.

   It should be remembered that the process of enclosure was not limited
   to just the period of the industrial revolution. As Colin Ward notes,
   "in Tudor times, a wave of enclosures by land-owners who sought to
   profit from the high price of wool had deprived the commoners of their
   livelihood and obliged them to seek work elsewhere or become vagrants
   or squatters on the wastes on the edges of villages." [Cotters and
   Squatters, p. 30] This first wave increased the size of the rural
   proletariat who sold their labour to landlords. Nor should we forget
   that this imposition of capitalist property rights did not imply that
   it was illegal. As Michael Perelman notes,"[f]ormally, this
   dispossession was perfectly legal. After all, the peasants did not have
   property rights in the narrow sense. They only had traditional rights.
   As markets evolved, first land-hungry gentry and later the bourgeoisie
   used the state to create a legal structure to abrogate these
   traditional rights." [The Invention of Capitalism, pp. 13-4]

   While technically legal as the landlords made the law, the impact of
   this stealing of the land should not be under estimated. Without land,
   you cannot live and have to sell your liberty to others. This places
   those with capital at an advantage, which will tend to increase, rather
   than decrease, the inequalities in society (and so place the landless
   workers at an increasing disadvantage over time). This process can be
   seen from early stages of capitalism. With the enclosure of the land an
   agricultural workforce was created which had to travel where the work
   was. This influx of landless ex-peasants into the towns ensured that
   the traditional guild system crumbled and was transformed into
   capitalistic industry with bosses and wage slaves rather than master
   craftsmen and their journeymen. Hence the enclosure of land played a
   key role, for "it is clear that economic inequalities are unlikely to
   create a division of society into an employing master class and a
   subject wage-earning class, unless access to the means of production,
   including land, is by some means or another barred to a substantial
   section of the community." [Maurice Dobb, Studies in Capitalist
   Development, p. 253]

   The importance of access to land is summarised by this limerick by the
   followers of Henry George (a 19th century writer who argued for a
   "single tax" and the nationalisation of land). The Georgites got their
   basic argument on the importance of land down these few, excellent,
   lines:

                         A college economist planned
                       To live without access to land
                           He would have succeeded
                          But found that he needed
                    Food, shelter and somewhere to stand.

   Thus anarchists concern over the "land monopoly" of which the Enclosure
   Acts were but one part. The land monopoly, to use Tucker's words,
   "consists in the enforcement by government of land titles which do not
   rest upon personal occupancy and cultivation." [The Anarchist Reader,
   p. 150] So it should be remembered that common land did not include the
   large holdings of members of the feudal aristocracy and other
   landlords. This helped to artificially limit available land and produce
   a rural proletariat just as much as enclosures.

   It is important to remember that wage labour first developed on the
   land and it was the protection of land titles of landlords and
   nobility, combined with enclosure, that meant people could not just
   work their own land. The pressing economic circumstances created by
   enclosing the land and enforcing property rights to large estates
   ensured that capitalists did not have to point a gun at people's heads
   to get them to work long hours in authoritarian, dehumanising
   conditions. In such circumstances, when the majority are dispossessed
   and face the threat of starvation, poverty, homelessness and so on,
   "initiation of force" is not required. But guns were required to
   enforce the system of private property that created the labour market
   in the first place, to enclosure common land and protect the estates of
   the nobility and wealthy.

   By decreasing the availability of land for rural people, the enclosures
   destroyed working-class independence. Through these Acts, innumerable
   peasants were excluded from access to their former means of livelihood,
   forcing them to seek work from landlords or to migrate to the cities to
   seek work in the newly emerging factories of the budding industrial
   capitalists who were thus provided with a ready source of cheap labour.
   The capitalists, of course, did not describe the results this way, but
   attempted to obfuscate the issue with their usual rhetoric about
   civilisation and progress. Thus John Bellers, a 17th-century supporter
   of enclosures, claimed that commons were "a hindrance to Industry, and
   . . . Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence." The "forests and great
   Commons make the Poor that are upon them too much like the indians."
   [quoted by Thompson, Op. Cit., p. 165] Elsewhere Thompson argues that
   the commons "were now seen as a dangerous centre of indiscipline . . .
   Ideology was added to self-interest. It became a matter of
   public-spirited policy for gentlemen to remove cottagers from the
   commons, reduce his labourers to dependence." [The Making of the
   English Working Class, pp. 242-3] David McNally confirms this, arguing
   "it was precisely these elements of material and spiritual independence
   that many of the most outspoken advocates of enclosure sought to
   destroy." Eighteenth-century proponents of enclosure "were remarkably
   forthright in this respect. Common rights and access to common lands,
   they argued, allowed a degree of social and economic independence, and
   thereby produced a lazy, dissolute mass of rural poor who eschewed
   honest labour and church attendance . . . Denying such people common
   lands and common rights would force them to conform to the harsh
   discipline imposed by the market in labour." [Against the Market, p.
   19]

   The commons gave working-class people a degree of independence which
   allowed them to be "insolent" to their betters. This had to be stopped,
   as it undermined to the very roots of authority relationships within
   society. The commons increased freedom for ordinary people and made
   them less willing to follow orders and accept wage labour. The
   reference to "Indians" is important, as the independence and freedom of
   Native Americans is well documented. The common feature of both
   cultures was communal ownership of the means of production and free
   access to it (usufruct). This is discussed further in section I.7
   ([10]Won't Libertarian Socialism destroy individuality?). As Bookchin
   stressed, the factory "was not born from a need to integrate labour
   with modern machinery," rather it was to regulate labour and make it
   regular. For the "irregularity, or 'naturalness,' in the rhythm and
   intensity of traditional systems of work contributed more towards the
   bourgeoisie's craze for social control and its savagely
   anti-naturalistic outlook than did the prices or earnings demanded by
   its employees. More than any single technical factor, this irregularity
   led to the rationalisation of labour under a single ensemble of rule,
   to a discipline of work and regulation of time that yielded the modern
   factory . . . the initial goal of the factory was to dominate labour
   and destroy the worker's independence from capital." [The Ecology of
   Freedom p. 406]

   Hence the pressing need to break the workers' ties with the land and so
   the "loss of this independence included the loss of the worker's
   contact with food cultivation . . . To live in a cottage . . . often
   meant to cultivate a family garden, possibly to pasture a cow, to
   prepare one's own bread, and to have the skills for keeping a home in
   good repair. To utterly erase these skills and means of a livelihood
   from the worker's life became an industrial imperative." Thus the
   worker's "complete dependence on the factory and on an industrial
   labour market was a compelling precondition for the triumph of
   industrial society . . . The need to destroy whatever independent means
   of life the worker could garner . . . all involved the issue of
   reducing the proletariat to a condition of total powerlessness in the
   face of capital. And with that powerlessness came a supineness, a loss
   of character and community, and a decline in moral fibre." [Bookchin,
   Op. Cit.,, pp. 406-7] Unsurprisingly, there was a positive association
   between enclosure and migration out of villages and a "definite
   correlation . . . between the extent of enclosure and reliance on poor
   rates . . . parliamentary enclosure resulted in out-migration and a
   higher level of pauperisation." Moreover, "the standard of living was
   generally much higher in those areas where labourer managed to combine
   industrial work with farming . . . Access to commons meant that
   labourers could graze animals, gather wood, stones and gravel, dig
   coal, hunt and fish. These rights often made the difference between
   subsistence and abject poverty." [David McNally, Op. Cit., p. 14 and p.
   18] Game laws also ensured that the peasantry and servants could not
   legally hunt for food as from the time of Richard II (1389) to 1831, no
   person could kill game unless qualified by estate or social standing.

   The enclosure of the commons (in whatever form it took -- see
   [11]section F.8.5 for the US equivalent) solved both problems -- the
   high cost of labour, and the freedom and dignity of the worker. The
   enclosures perfectly illustrate the principle that capitalism requires
   a state to ensure that the majority of people do not have free access
   to any means of livelihood and so must sell themselves to capitalists
   in order to survive. There is no doubt that if the state had "left
   alone" the European peasantry, allowing them to continue their
   collective farming practices ("collective farming" because, as
   Kropotkin shows, the peasants not only shared the land but much of the
   farm labour as well), capitalism could not have taken hold (see Mutual
   Aid for more on the European enclosures [pp. 184-189]). As Kropotkin
   notes, "[i]nstances of commoners themselves dividing their lands were
   rare, everywhere the State coerced them to enforce the division, or
   simply favoured the private appropriation of their lands" by the nobles
   and wealthy. Thus "to speak of the natural death of the village
   community [or the commons] in virtue of economical law is as grim a
   joke as to speak of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a
   battlefield." [Mutual Aid, p. 188 and p. 189]

   Once a labour market was created by means of enclosure and the land
   monopoly, the state did not passively let it work. When market
   conditions favoured the working class, the state took heed of the calls
   of landlords and capitalists and intervened to restore the "natural"
   order. The state actively used the law to lower wages and ban unions of
   workers for centuries. In Britain, for example, after the Black Death
   there was a "servant" shortage. Rather than allow the market to work
   its magic, the landlords turned to the state and the result was "the
   Statute of Labourers" of 1351:

     "Whereas late against the malice of servants, which were idle, and
     not willing to serve after the pestilence, without taking excessive
     wages, it was ordained by our lord the king . . . that such manner
     of servants . . . should be bound to serve, receiving salary and
     wages, accustomed in places where they ought to serve in the
     twentieth year of the reign of the king that now is, or five or six
     years before; and that the same servants refusing to serve in such
     manner should be punished by imprisonment of their bodies . . . now
     forasmuch as it is given the king to understand in this present
     parliament, by the petition of the commonalty, that the said
     servants having no regard to the said ordinance, . . to the great
     damage of the great men, and impoverishing of all the said
     commonalty, whereof the said commonalty prayeth remedy: wherefore in
     the said parliament, by the assent of the said prelates, earls,
     barons, and other great men, and of the same commonalty there
     assembled, to refrain the malice of the said servants, be ordained
     and established the things underwritten."

   Thus state action was required because labourers had increased
   bargaining power and commanded higher wages which, in turn, led to
   inflation throughout the economy. In other words, an early version of
   the NAIRU (see [12]section C.9). In one form or another this statute
   remained in force right through to the 19th century (later versions
   made it illegal for employees to "conspire" to fix wages, i.e., to
   organise to demand wage increases). Such measures were particularly
   sought when the labour market occasionally favoured the working class.
   For example, "[a]fter the Restoration [of the English Monarchy]," noted
   Dobb, "when labour-scarcity had again become a serious complaint and
   the propertied class had been soundly frightened by the insubordination
   of the Commonwealth years, the clamour for legislative interference to
   keep wages low, to drive the poor into employment and to extend the
   system of workhouses and 'houses of correction' and the farming out of
   paupers once more reached a crescendo." The same occurred on
   Continental Europe. [Op. Cit., p. 234]

   So, time and again employers called on the state to provide force to
   suppress the working class, artificially lower wages and bolster their
   economic power and authority. While such legislation was often
   difficult to enforce and often ineffectual in that real wages did, over
   time, increase, the threat and use of state coercion would ensure that
   they did not increase as fast as they may otherwise have done.
   Similarly, the use of courts and troops to break unions and strikes
   helped the process of capital accumulation immensely. Then there were
   the various laws used to control the free movement of workers. "For
   centuries," notes Colin Ward, "the lives of the poor majority in rural
   England were dominated by the Poor law and its ramifications, like the
   Settlement Act of 1697 which debarred strangers from entering a parish
   unless they had a Settlement Certificate in which their home parish
   agreed to take them back if they became in need of poor relief. Like
   the Workhouse, it was a hated institution that lasted into the 20th
   century." [Op. Cit., p. 31]

   As Kropotkin stressed, "it was the State which undertook to settle . .
   . griefs" between workers and bosses "so as to guarantee a 'convenient'
   livelihood" (convenient for the masters, of course). It also acted
   "severely to prohibit all combinations . . . under the menace of severe
   punishments . . . Both in the town and in the village the State reigned
   over loose aggregations of individuals, and was ready to prevent by the
   most stringent measures the reconstitution of any sort of separate
   unions among them." Workers who formed unions "were prosecuted
   wholesale under the Master and Servant Act -- workers being summarily
   arrested and condemned upon a mere complaint of misbehaviour lodged by
   the master. Strikes were suppressed in an autocratic way . . . to say
   nothing of the military suppression of strike riots . . . To practice
   mutual support under such circumstances was anything but an easy task .
   . . After a long fight, which lasted over a hundred years, the right of
   combing together was conquered." [Mutual Aid, p. 210 and p. 211] It
   took until 1813 until the laws regulating wages were repealed while the
   laws against combinations remained until 1825 (although that did not
   stop the Tolpuddle Martyrs being convicted of "administering an illegal
   oath" and deported to Tasmania in 1834). Fifty years later, the
   provisions of the statues of labourers which made it a civil action if
   the boss broke his contract but a criminal action if the worker broke
   it were repealed. Trade unions were given legal recognition in 1871
   while, at the same time, another law limited what the workers could do
   in a strike or lockout. The British ideals of free trade never included
   freedom to organise.

   (Luckily, by then, economists were at hand to explain to the workers
   that organising to demand higher wages was against their own
   self-interest. By a strange coincidence, all those laws against unions
   had actually helped the working class by enforcing the necessary
   conditions for perfect competition in labour market! What are the
   chances of that? Of course, while considered undesirable from the
   perspective of mainstream economists -- and, by strange co-incidence,
   the bosses -- unions are generally not banned these days but rather
   heavily regulated. The freedom loving, deregulating Thatcherites passed
   six Employment Acts between 1980 and 1993 restricting industrial action
   by requiring pre-strike ballots, outlawing secondary action,
   restricting picketing and giving employers the right to seek
   injunctions where there is doubt about the legality of action -- in the
   workers' interest, of course as, for some reason, politicians, bosses
   and economists have always known what best for trade unionists rather
   than the trade unionists themselves. And if they objected, well, that
   was what the state was for.)

   So to anyone remotely familiar with working class history the notion
   that there could be an economic theory which ignores power relations
   between bosses and workers is a particularly self-serving joke.
   Economic relations always have a power element, even if only to protect
   the property and power of the wealthy -- the Invisible Hand always
   counts on a very visible Iron Fist when required. As Kropotkin
   memorably put it, the rise of capitalism has always seen the State
   "tighten the screw for the worker" and "impos[ing] industrial serfdom."
   So what the bourgeoisie "swept away as harmful to industry" was
   anything considered as "useless and harmful" but that class "was at
   pains not to sweep away was the power of the State over industry, over
   the factory serf." Nor should the role of public schooling be
   overlooked, within which "the spirit of voluntary servitude was always
   cleverly cultivated in the minds of the young, and still is, in order
   to perpetuate the subjection of the individual to the State." [The
   State: Its Historic Role, pp. 52-3 and p. 55] Such education also
   ensured that children become used to the obedience and boredom required
   for wage slavery.

   Like the more recent case of fascist Chile, "free market" capitalism
   was imposed on the majority of society by an elite using the
   authoritarian state. This was recognised by Adam Smith when he opposed
   state intervention in The Wealth of Nations. In Smith's day, the
   government was openly and unashamedly an instrument of wealth owners.
   Less than 10 per cent of British men (and no women) had the right to
   vote. When Smith opposed state interference, he was opposing the
   imposition of wealth owners' interests on everybody else (and, of
   course, how "liberal", never mind "libertarian", is a political system
   in which the many follow the rules and laws set-down in the so-called
   interests of all by the few? As history shows, any minority given, or
   who take, such power will abuse it in their own interests). Today, the
   situation is reversed, with neo-liberals and right-"libertarians"
   opposing state interference in the economy (e.g. regulation of Big
   Business) so as to prevent the public from having even a minor impact
   on the power or interests of the elite. The fact that "free market"
   capitalism always requires introduction by an authoritarian state
   should make all honest "Libertarians" ask: How "free" is the "free
   market"?

F.8.4 Aren't the enclosures a socialist myth?

   The short answer is no, they are not. While a lot of historical
   analysis has been spent in trying to deny the extent and impact of the
   enclosures, the simple fact is (in the words of noted historian E.P.
   Thompson) enclosure "was a plain enough case of class robbery, played
   according to the fair rules of property and law laid down by a
   parliament of property-owners and lawyers." [The Making of the English
   Working Class, pp. 237-8]

   The enclosures were one of the ways that the "land monopoly" was
   created. The land monopoly referred to feudal and capitalist property
   rights and ownership of land by (among others) the Individualist
   Anarchists. Instead of an "occupancy and use" regime advocated by
   anarchists, the land monopoly allowed a few to bar the many from the
   land -- so creating a class of people with nothing to sell but their
   labour. While this monopoly is less important these days in developed
   nations (few people know how to farm) it was essential as a means of
   consolidating capitalism. Given the choice, most people preferred to
   become independent farmers rather than wage workers (see [13]next
   section). As such, the "land monopoly" involves more than simply
   enclosing common land but also enforcing the claims of landlords to
   areas of land greater than they can work by their own labour.

   Needless to say, the titles of landlords and the state are generally
   ignored by supporters of capitalism who tend to concentrate on the
   enclosure movement in order to downplay its importance. Little wonder,
   for it is something of an embarrassment for them to acknowledge that
   the creation of capitalism was somewhat less than "immaculate" -- after
   all, capitalism is portrayed as an almost ideal society of freedom. To
   find out that an idol has feet of clay and that we are still living
   with the impact of its origins is something pro-capitalists must deny.
   So are the enclosures a socialist myth? Most claims that it is flow
   from the work of the historian J.D. Chambers' famous essay "Enclosures
   and the Labour Supply in the Industrial Revolution." [Economic History
   Review, 2nd series, no. 5, August 1953] In this essay, Chambers
   attempts to refute Karl Marx's account of the enclosures and the role
   it played in what Marx called "primitive accumulation."

   We cannot be expected to provide an extensive account of the debate
   that has raged over this issue (Colin Ward notes that "a later series
   of scholars have provided locally detailed evidence that reinforces"
   the traditional socialist analysis of enclosure and its impact.
   [Cotters and Squatters, p. 143]). All we can do is provide a summary of
   the work of William Lazonick who presented an excellent reply to those
   who claim that the enclosures were an unimportant historical event (see
   his "Karl Marx and Enclosures in England." [Review of Radical Political
   Economy, no. 6, pp. 1-32]). Here, we draw upon his subsequent
   summarisation of his critique provided in his books Competitive
   Advantage on the Shop Floor and Business Organisation and the Myth of
   the Market Economy.

   There are three main claims against the socialist account of the
   enclosures. We will cover each in turn.

   Firstly, it is often claimed that the enclosures drove the uprooted
   cottager and small peasant into industry. However, this was never
   claimed. As Lazonick stresses while some economic historians "have
   attributed to Marx the notion that, in one fell swoop, the enclosure
   movement drove the peasants off the soil and into the factories. Marx
   did not put forth such a simplistic view of the rise of a wage-labour
   force . . . Despite gaps and omission in Marx's historical analysis,
   his basic arguments concerning the creation of a landless proletariat
   are both important and valid. The transformations of social relations
   of production and the emergence of a wage-labour force in the
   agricultural sector were the critical preconditions for the Industrial
   Revolution." [Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor, pp. 12-3]

   It is correct, as the critics of Marx stress, that the agricultural
   revolution associated with the enclosures increased the demand for farm
   labour as claimed by Chambers and others. And this is the whole point
   -- enclosures created a pool of dispossessed labourers who had to sell
   their time/liberty to survive and whether this was to a landlord or an
   industrialist is irrelevant (as Marx himself stressed). As such, the
   account by Chambers, ironically, "confirms the broad outlines of Marx's
   arguments" as it implicitly acknowledges that "over the long run the
   massive reallocation of access to land that enclosures entailed
   resulted in the separation of the mass of agricultural producers from
   the means of production." So the "critical transformation was not the
   level of agricultural employment before and after enclosure but the
   changes in employment relations caused by the reorganisation of
   landholdings and the reallocation of access to land." [Op. Cit., p. 29,
   pp. 29-30 and p. 30] Thus the key feature of the enclosures was that it
   created a supply for farm labour, a supply that had no choice but to
   work for another. Once freed from the land, these workers could later
   move to the towns in search for better work:

     "Critical to the Marxian thesis of the origins of the industrial
     labour force is the transformation of the social relations of
     agriculture and the creation, in the first instance, of an
     agricultural wage-labour force that might eventually, perhaps
     through market incentives, be drawn into the industrial labour
     force." [Business Organisation and the Myth of the Market Economy,
     p. 273]

   In summary, when the critics argue that enclosures increased the demand
   for farm labour they are not refuting Marx but confirming his analysis.
   This is because the enclosures had resulted in a transformation in
   employment relations in agriculture with the peasants and farmers
   turned into wage workers for landlords (i.e., rural capitalists). For
   if wage labour is the defining characteristic of capitalism then it
   matters little if the boss is a farmer or an industrialist. This means
   that the "critics, it turns out, have not differed substantially with
   Marx on the facts of agricultural transformation. But by ignoring the
   historical and theoretical significance of the resultant changes in the
   social relations of agricultural production, the critics have missed
   Marx's main point." [Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor, p. 30]

   Secondly, it is argued that the number of small farm owners increased,
   or at least did not greatly decline, and so the enclosure movement was
   unimportant. Again, this misses the point. Small farm owners can still
   employ wage workers (i.e. become capitalist farmers as opposed to
   "yeomen" -- an independent peasant proprietor). As Lazonick notes,
   "[i]t is true that after 1750 some petty proprietors continued to
   occupy and work their own land. But in a world of capitalist
   agriculture, the yeomanry no longer played an important role in
   determining the course of capitalist agriculture. As a social class
   that could influence the evolution of British economy society, the
   yeomanry had disappeared." Moreover, Chambers himself acknowledged that
   for the poor without legal rights in land, then enclosure injured them.
   For "the majority of the agricultural population . . . had only
   customary rights. To argue that these people were not treated unfairly
   because they did not possess legally enforceable property rights is
   irrelevant to the fact that they were dispossessed by enclosures.
   Again, Marx's critics have failed to address the issue of the
   transformation of access to the means of production as a precondition
   for the Industrial Revolution." [Op. Cit., p. 32 and p. 31]

   Thirdly, it is often claimed that it was population growth, rather than
   enclosures, that caused the supply of wage workers. So was population
   growth more important than enclosures? Given that enclosure impacted on
   the individuals and social customs of the time, it is impossible to
   separate the growth in population from the social context in which it
   happened. As such, the population argument ignores the question of
   whether the changes in society caused by enclosures and the rise of
   capitalism have an impact on the observed trends towards earlier
   marriage and larger families after 1750. Lazonick argues that "[t]here
   is reason to believe that they did." [Op. Cit., p. 33] Overall,
   Lazonick notes that "[i]t can even be argued that the changed social
   relations of agriculture altered the constraints on early marriage and
   incentives to childbearing that contributed to the growth in
   population. The key point is that transformations in social relations
   in production can influence, and have influenced, the quantity of wage
   labour supplied on both agricultural and industrial labour markets. To
   argue that population growth created the industrial labour supply is to
   ignore these momentous social transformations" associated with the rise
   of capitalism. [Business Organisation and the Myth of the Market
   Economy, p. 273]

   In other words, there is good reason to think that the enclosures, far
   from being some kind of socialist myth, in fact played a key role in
   the development of capitalism. As Lazonick notes, "Chambers
   misunderstood" the "argument concerning the 'institutional creation' of
   a proletarianised (i.e. landless) workforce. Indeed, Chamber's own
   evidence and logic tend to support the Marxian [and anarchist!]
   argument, when it is properly understood." [Op. Cit., p. 273]

   Lastly, it must be stressed that this process of dispossession happened
   over hundreds of years. It was not a case of simply driving peasants
   off their land and into factories. In fact, the first acts of
   expropriation took place in agriculture and created a rural proletariat
   which had to sell their labour/liberty to landlords and it was the
   second wave of enclosures, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
   that was closely connected with the process of industrialisation. The
   enclosure movement, moreover, was imposed in an uneven way, affecting
   different areas at different times, depending on the power of peasant
   resistance and the nature of the crops being grown (and other objective
   conditions). Nor was it a case of an instant transformation -- for a
   long period this rural proletariat was not totally dependent on wages,
   still having some access to the land and wastes for fuel and food. So
   while rural wage workers did exist throughout the period from 1350 to
   the 1600s, capitalism was not fully established in Britain yet as such
   people comprised only a small proportion of the labouring classes. The
   acts of enclosure were just one part of a long process by which a
   proletariat was created.

F.8.5 What about the lack of enclosures in the Americas?

   The enclosure movement was but one part of a wide-reaching process of
   state intervention in creating capitalism. Moreover, it is just one way
   of creating the "land monopoly" which ensured the creation of a working
   class. The circumstances facing the ruling class in the Americas were
   distinctly different than in the Old World and so the "land monopoly"
   took a different form there. In the Americas, enclosures were
   unimportant as customary land rights did not really exist (at least
   once the Native Americans were eliminated by violence). Here the
   problem was that (after the original users of the land were eliminated)
   there were vast tracts of land available for people to use. Other forms
   of state intervention were similar to that applied under mercantilism
   in Europe (such as tariffs, government spending, use of unfree labour
   and state repression of workers and their organisations and so on). All
   had one aim, to enrich and power the masters and dispossess the actual
   producers of the means of life (land and means of production).

   Unsurprisingly, due to the abundance of land, there was a movement
   towards independent farming in the early years of the American colonies
   and subsequent Republic and this pushed up the price of remaining
   labour on the market by reducing the supply. Capitalists found it
   difficult to find workers willing to work for them at wages low enough
   to provide them with sufficient profits. It was due to the difficulty
   in finding cheap enough labour that capitalists in America turned to
   slavery. All things being equal, wage labour is more productive than
   slavery but in early America all things were not equal. Having access
   to cheap (indeed, free) land meant that working people had a choice,
   and few desired to become wage slaves and so because of this,
   capitalists turned to slavery in the South and the "land monopoly" in
   the North.

   This was because, in the words of Maurice Dobb, it "became clear to
   those who wished to reproduce capitalist relations of production in the
   new country that the foundation-stone of their endeavour must be the
   restriction of land-ownership to a minority and the exclusion of the
   majority from any share in [productive] property." [Studies in
   Capitalist Development, pp. 221-2] As one radical historian puts it,
   "[w]hen land is 'free' or 'cheap'. as it was in different regions of
   the United States before the 1830s, there was no compulsion for farmers
   to introduce labour-saving technology. As a result, 'independent
   household production' . . . hindered the development of capitalism . .
   . [by] allowing large portions of the population to escape wage
   labour." [Charlie Post, "The 'Agricultural Revolution' in the United
   States", pp. 216-228, Science and Society, vol. 61, no. 2, p. 221]

   It was precisely this option (i.e. of independent production) that had
   to be destroyed in order for capitalist industry to develop. The state
   had to violate the holy laws of "supply and demand" by controlling the
   access to land in order to ensure the normal workings of "supply and
   demand" in the labour market (i.e. that the bargaining position
   favoured employer over employee). Once this situation became the
   typical one (i.e., when the option of self-employment was effectively
   eliminated) a more (protectionist based) "laissez-faire" approach could
   be adopted, with state action used indirectly to favour the capitalists
   and landlords (and readily available to protect private property from
   the actions of the dispossessed).

   So how was this transformation of land ownership achieved?

   Instead of allowing settlers to appropriate their own farms as was
   often the case before the 1830s, the state stepped in once the army had
   cleared out (usually by genocide) the original users. Its first major
   role was to enforce legal rights of property on unused land. Land
   stolen from the Native Americans was sold at auction to the highest
   bidders, namely speculators, who then sold it on to farmers. This
   process started right "after the revolution, [when] huge sections of
   land were bought up by rich speculators" and their claims supported by
   the law. [Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, p. 125]
   Thus land which should have been free was sold to land-hungry farmers
   and the few enriched themselves at the expense of the many. Not only
   did this increase inequality within society, it also encouraged the
   development of wage labour -- having to pay for land would have ensured
   that many immigrants remained on the East Coast until they had enough
   money. Thus a pool of people with little option but to sell their
   labour was increased due to state protection of unoccupied land. That
   the land usually ended up in the hands of farmers did not (could not)
   countermand the shift in class forces that this policy created.

   This was also the essential role of the various "Homesteading Acts"
   and, in general, the "Federal land law in the 19th century provided for
   the sale of most of the public domain at public auction to the higher
   bidder . . . Actual settlers were forced to buy land from speculators,
   at prices considerably above the federal minimal price." (which few
   people could afford anyway). [Charlie Post, Op. Cit., p. 222] This is
   confirmed by Howard Zinn who notes that 1862 Homestead Act "gave 160
   acres of western land, unoccupied and publicly owned, to anyone who
   would cultivate it for five years . . . Few ordinary people had the
   $200 necessary to do this; speculators moved in and bought up much of
   the land. Homestead land added up to 50 million acres. But during the
   Civil War, over 100 million acres were given by Congress and the
   President to various railroads, free of charge." [Op. Cit., p. 233]
   Little wonder the Individualist Anarchists supported an "occupancy and
   use" system of land ownership as a key way of stopping capitalist and
   landlord usury as well as the development of capitalism itself.

   This change in the appropriation of land had significant effects on
   agriculture and the desirability of taking up farming for immigrants.
   As Post notes, "[w]hen the social conditions for obtaining and
   maintaining possession of land change, as they did in the Midwest
   between 1830 and 1840, pursuing the goal of preserving [family
   ownership and control] . . . produced very different results. In order
   to pay growing mortgages, debts and taxes, family farmers were
   compelled to specialise production toward cash crops and to market more
   and more of their output." [Op. Cit., p. 221-2]

   So, in order to pay for land which was formerly free, farmers got
   themselves into debt and increasingly turned to the market to pay it
   off. Thus, the "Federal land system, by transforming land into a
   commodity and stimulating land speculation, made the Midwestern farmers
   dependent upon markets for the continual possession of their farms."
   Once on the market, farmers had to invest in new machinery and this
   also got them into debt. In the face of a bad harvest or market glut,
   they could not repay their loans and their farms had to be sold to so
   do so. By 1880, 25% of all farms were rented by tenants, and the
   numbers kept rising. In addition, the "transformation of social
   property relations in northern agriculture set the stage for the
   'agricultural revolution' of the 1840s and 1850s . . . [R]ising debts
   and taxes forced Midwestern family farmers to compete as commodity
   producers in order to maintain their land-holding . . . The
   transformation . . . was the central precondition for the development
   of industrial capitalism in the United States." [Charlie Post, Op.
   Cit., p. 223 and p. 226]

   It should be noted that feudal land owning was enforced in many areas
   of the colonies and the early Republic. Landlords had their holdings
   protected by the state and their demands for rent had the full backing
   of the state. This lead to numerous anti-rent conflicts. [Howard Zinn,
   A People's History of the United States, p. 84 and pp. 206-11] Such
   struggles helped end such arrangements, with landlords being
   "encouraged" to allow the farmers to buy the land which was rightfully
   theirs. The wealth appropriated from the farmers in the form of rent
   and the price of the land could then be invested in industry so
   transforming feudal relations on the land into capitalist relations in
   industry (and, eventually, back on the land when the farmers succumbed
   to the pressures of the capitalist market and debt forced them to
   sell).

   This means that Murray Rothbard's comment that "once the land was
   purchased by the settler, the injustice disappeared" is nonsense -- the
   injustice was transmitted to other parts of society and this, the wider
   legacy of the original injustice, lived on and helped transform society
   towards capitalism. In addition, his comment about "the establishment
   in North America of a truly libertarian land system" would be one the
   Individualist Anarchists of the period would have seriously disagreed
   with! [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 73] Rothbard, at times, seems to be
   vaguely aware of the importance of land as the basis of freedom in
   early America. For example, he notes in passing that "the abundance of
   fertile virgin land in a vast territory enabled individualism to come
   to full flower in many areas." [Conceived in Liberty, vol. 2, p. 186]
   Yet he did not ponder the transformation in social relationships which
   would result when that land was gone. In fact, he was blas about it.
   "If latecomers are worse off," he opined, "well then that is their
   proper assumption of risk in this free and uncertain world. There is no
   longer a vast frontier in the United States, and there is no point
   crying over the fact." [The Ethics of Liberty, p. 240] Unsurprisingly
   we also find Murray Rothbard commenting that Native Americans "lived
   under a collectivistic regime that, for land allocation, was scarcely
   more just than the English governmental land grab." [Conceived in
   Liberty, vol. 1, p. 187] That such a regime made for increased
   individual liberty and that it was precisely the independence from the
   landlord and bosses this produced which made enclosure and state land
   grabs such appealing prospects for the ruling class was lost on him.

   Unlike capitalist economists, politicians and bosses at the time,
   Rothbard seemed unaware that this "vast frontier" (like the commons)
   was viewed as a major problem for maintaining labour discipline and
   appropriate state action was taken to reduce it by restricting free
   access to the land in order to ensure that workers were dependent on
   wage labour. Many early economists recognised this and advocated such
   action. Edward Wakefield was typical when he complained that "where
   land is cheap and all are free, where every one who so pleases can
   easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour dear, as
   respects the labourer's share of the product, but the difficulty is to
   obtain combined labour at any price." This resulted in a situation were
   few "can accumulate great masses of wealth" as workers "cease . . . to
   be labourers for hire; they . . . become independent landowners, if not
   competitors with their former masters in the labour market."
   Unsurprisingly, Wakefield urged state action to reduce this option and
   ensure that labour become cheap as workers had little choice but to
   seek a master. One key way was for the state to seize the land and then
   sell it to the population. This would ensure that "no labourer would be
   able to procure land until he had worked for money" and this "would
   produce capital for the employment of more labourers." [quoted by Marx,
   Op. Cit., , p. 935, p. 936 and p. 939] Which is precisely what did
   occur.

   At the same time that it excluded the working class from virgin land,
   the state granted large tracts of land to the privileged classes: to
   land speculators, logging and mining companies, planters, railroads,
   and so on. In addition to seizing the land and distributing it in such
   a way as to benefit capitalist industry, the "government played its
   part in helping the bankers and hurting the farmers; it kept the amount
   of money -- based in the gold supply -- steady while the population
   rose, so there was less and less money in circulation. The farmer had
   to pay off his debts in dollars that were harder to get. The bankers,
   getting loans back, were getting dollars worth more than when they
   loaned them out -- a kind of interest on top of interest. That was why
   so much of the talk of farmers' movements in those days had to do with
   putting more money in circulation." [Zinn, Op. Cit., p. 278] This was
   the case with the Individualist Anarchists at the same time, we must
   add.

   Overall, therefore, state action ensured the transformation of America
   from a society of independent workers to a capitalist one. By creating
   and enforcing the "land monopoly" (of which state ownership of
   unoccupied land and its enforcement of landlord rights were the most
   important) the state ensured that the balance of class forces tipped in
   favour of the capitalist class. By removing the option of farming your
   own land, the US government created its own form of enclosure and the
   creation of a landless workforce with little option but to sell its
   liberty on the "free market". They was nothing "natural" about it.
   Little wonder the Individualist Anarchist J.K. Ingalls attacked the
   "land monopoly" with the following words:

     "The earth, with its vast resources of mineral wealth, its
     spontaneous productions and its fertile soil, the free gift of God
     and the common patrimony of mankind, has for long centuries been
     held in the grasp of one set of oppressors by right of conquest or
     right of discovery; and it is now held by another, through the right
     of purchase from them. All of man's natural possessions . . . have
     been claimed as property; nor has man himself escaped the insatiate
     jaws of greed. The invasion of his rights and possessions has
     resulted . . . in clothing property with a power to accumulate an
     income." [quoted by James Martin, Men Against the State, p. 142]

   Marx, correctly, argued that "the capitalist mode of production and
   accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their
   fundamental condition the annihilation of that private property which
   rests on the labour of the individual himself; in other words, the
   expropriation of the worker." [Capital, Vol. 1, p. 940] He noted that
   to achieve this, the state is used:

     "How then can the anti-capitalistic cancer of the colonies be
     healed? . . . Let the Government set an artificial price on the
     virgin soil, a price independent of the law of supply and demand, a
     price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages
     before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into
     an independent farmer." [Op. Cit., p. 938]

   Moreover, tariffs were introduced with "the objective of manufacturing
   capitalists artificially" for the "system of protection was an
   artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, or expropriating
   independent workers, of capitalising the national means of production
   and subsistence, and of forcibly cutting short the transition . . . to
   the modern mode of production," to capitalism [Op. Cit., p. 932 and pp.
   921-2]

   So mercantilism, state aid in capitalist development, was also seen in
   the United States of America. As Edward Herman points out, the "level
   of government involvement in business in the United States from the
   late eighteenth century to the present has followed a U-shaped pattern:
   There was extensive government intervention in the pre-Civil War period
   (major subsidies, joint ventures with active government participation
   and direct government production), then a quasi-laissez faire period
   between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century [a period
   marked by "the aggressive use of tariff protection" and state supported
   railway construction, a key factor in capitalist expansion in the USA],
   followed by a gradual upswing of government intervention in the
   twentieth century, which accelerated after 1930." [Corporate Control,
   Corporate Power, p. 162]

   Such intervention ensured that income was transferred from workers to
   capitalists. Under state protection, America industrialised by forcing
   the consumer to enrich the capitalists and increase their capital
   stock. "According to one study, if the tariff had been removed in the
   1830s 'about half the industrial sector of New England would have been
   bankrupted' . . . the tariff became a near-permanent political
   institution representing government assistance to manufacturing. It
   kept price levels from being driven down by foreign competition and
   thereby shifted the distribution of income in favour of owners of
   industrial property to the disadvantage of workers and customers." This
   protection was essential, for the "end of the European wars in 1814 . .
   . reopened the United States to a flood of British imports that drove
   many American competitors out of business. Large portions of the newly
   expanded manufacturing base were wiped out, bringing a decade of
   near-stagnation." Unsurprisingly, the "era of protectionism began in
   1816, with northern agitation for higher tariffs." [Richard B. Du Boff,
   Accumulation and Power, p. 56, p. 14 and p. 55] Combined with ready
   repression of the labour movement and government "homesteading" acts
   (see [14]section F.8.5), tariffs were the American equivalent of
   mercantilism (which, after all, was above all else a policy of
   protectionism, i.e. the use of government to stimulate the growth of
   native industry). Only once America was at the top of the economic pile
   did it renounce state intervention (just as Britain did, we must note).

   This is not to suggest that government aid was limited to tariffs. The
   state played a key role in the development of industry and
   manufacturing. As John Zerzan notes, the "role of the State is
   tellingly reflected by the fact that the 'armoury system' now rivals
   the older 'American system of manufactures' term as the more accurate
   to describe the new system of production methods" developed in the
   early 1800s. [Elements of Refusal, p. 100] By the middle of the
   nineteenth century "a distinctive 'American system of manufactures' had
   emerged . . . The lead in technological innovation [during the US
   Industrial Revolution] came in armaments where assured government
   orders justified high fixed-cost investments in special-pursue
   machinery and managerial personnel. Indeed, some of the pioneering
   effects occurred in government-owned armouries." Other forms of state
   aid were used, for example the textile industry "still required tariffs
   to protect [it] from . . . British competition." [William Lazonick,
   Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor, p. 218 and p. 219] The
   government also "actively furthered this process [of 'commercial
   revolution'] with public works in transportation and communication." In
   addition to this "physical" aid, "state government provided critical
   help, with devices like the chartered corporation" [Richard B. Du Boff,
   Op. Cit., p. 15] As we noted in [15]section B.2.5, there were changes
   in the legal system which favoured capitalist interests over the rest
   of society.

   Nineteenth-century America also went in heavily for industrial planning
   -- occasionally under that name but more often in the name of national
   defence. The military was the excuse for what is today termed
   rebuilding infrastructure, picking winners, promoting research, and
   co-ordinating industrial growth (as it still is, we should add). As
   Richard B. Du Boff points out, the "anti-state" backlash of the 1840s
   onwards in America was highly selective, as the general opinion was
   that "[h]enceforth, if governments wished to subsidise private business
   operations, there would be no objection. But if public power were to be
   used to control business actions or if the public sector were to
   undertake economic initiatives on its own, it would run up against the
   determined opposition of private capital." [Op. Cit., p. 26]

   State intervention was not limited to simply reducing the amount of
   available land or enforcing a high tariff. "Given the independent
   spirit of workers in the colonies, capital understood that great
   profits required the use of unfree labour." [Michael Perelman, The
   Invention of Capitalism, p. 246] It was also applied in the labour
   market as well. Most obviously, it enforced the property rights of
   slave owners (until the civil war, produced when the pro-free trade
   policies of the South clashed with the pro-tariff desires of the
   capitalist North). The evil and horrors of slavery are well documented,
   as is its key role in building capitalism in America and elsewhere so
   we will concentrate on other forms of obviously unfree labour. Convict
   labour in Australia, for example, played an important role in the early
   days of colonisation while in America indentured servants played a
   similar role.

   Indentured service was a system whereby workers had to labour for a
   specific number of years usually in return for passage to America with
   the law requiring the return of runaway servants. In theory, of course,
   the person was only selling their labour. In practice, indentured
   servants were basically slaves and the courts enforced the laws that
   made it so. The treatment of servants was harsh and often as brutal as
   that inflicted on slaves. Half the servants died in the first two years
   and unsurprisingly, runaways were frequent. The courts realised this
   was a problem and started to demand that everyone have identification
   and travel papers.

   It should also be noted that the practice of indentured servants also
   shows how state intervention in one country can impact on others. This
   is because people were willing to endure indentured service in the
   colonies because of how bad their situation was at home. Thus the
   effects of primitive accumulation in Britain impacted on the
   development of America as most indentured servants were recruited from
   the growing number of unemployed people in urban areas there.
   Dispossessed from their land and unable to find work in the cities,
   many became indentured servants in order to take passage to the
   Americas. In fact, between one half to two thirds of all immigrants to
   Colonial America arrived as indentured servants and, at times,
   three-quarters of the population of some colonies were under contracts
   of indenture. That this allowed the employing class to overcome their
   problems in hiring "help" should go without saying, as should its
   impact on American inequality and the ability of capitalists and
   landlords to enrich themselves on their servants labour and to invest
   it profitably.

   As well as allowing unfree labour, the American state intervened to
   ensure that the freedom of wage workers was limited in similar ways as
   we indicated in [16]section F.8.3. "The changes in social relations of
   production in artisan trades that took place in the thirty years after
   1790," notes one historian, "and the . . . trade unionism to which . .
   . it gave rise, both replicated in important respects the experience of
   workers in the artisan trades in Britain over a rather longer period .
   . . The juridical responses they provoked likewise reproduced English
   practice. Beginning in 1806, American courts consciously seized upon
   English common law precedent to combat journeymen's associations."
   Capitalists in this era tried to "secure profit . . . through the
   exercise of disciplinary power over their employees." To achieve this
   "employers made a bid for legal aid" and it is here "that the key to
   law's role in the process of creating an industrial economy in America
   lies." As in the UK, the state invented laws and issues proclamations
   against workers' combinations, calling them conspiracies and
   prosecuting them as such. Trade unionists argued that laws which
   declared unions as illegal combinations should be repealed as against
   the Constitution of the USA while "the specific cause of trademens
   protestations of their right to organise was, unsurprisingly, the
   willingness of local authorities to renew their resort to conspiracy
   indictments to countermand the growing power of the union movement."
   Using criminal conspiracy to counter combinations among employees was
   commonplace, with the law viewing a "collective quitting of employment
   [as] a criminal interference" and combinations to raise the rate of
   labour "indictable at common law." [Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor,
   and Ideology in the Early American Republic, p. 113, p. 295, p. 159 and
   p. 213] By the end of the nineteenth century, state repression for
   conspiracy was replaced by state repression for acting like a trust
   while actual trusts were ignored and so laws, ostensibly passed (with
   the help of the unions themselves) to limit the power of capital, were
   turned against labour (this should be unsurprising as it was a
   capitalist state which passed them). [Howard Zinn, A People's History
   of the United States, p. 254]

   Another key means to limit the freedom of workers was denying departing
   workers their wages for the part of the contract they had completed.
   This "underscored the judiciary's tendency to articulate their
   approval" of the hierarchical master/servant relationship in terms of
   its "social utility: It was a necessary and desirable feature of the
   social organisation of work . . . that the employer's authority be
   reinforced in this way." Appeals courts held that "an employment
   contract was an entire contract, and therefore that no obligation to
   pay wages existed until the employee had completed the agreed term."
   Law suits "by employers seeking damages for an employee's departure
   prior to the expiry of an agreed term or for other forms of breach of
   contract constituted one form of legally sanctioned economic discipline
   of some importance in shaping the employment relations of the
   nineteenth century." Thus the boss could fire the worker without paying
   their wages while if the worker left the boss he would expect a similar
   outcome. This was because the courts had decided that the "employer was
   entitled not only to receipt of the services contracted for in their
   entirety prior to payment but also to the obedience of the employee in
   the process of rendering them." [Tomlins, Op. Cit., pp. 278-9, p. 274,
   p. 272 and pp. 279-80] The ability of workers to seek self-employment
   on the farm or workplace or even better conditions and wages were
   simply abolished by employers turning to the state.

   So, in summary, the state could remedy the shortage of cheap wage
   labour by controlling access to the land, repressing trade unions as
   conspiracies or trusts and ensuring that workers had to obey their
   bosses for the full term of their contract (while the bosses could fire
   them at will). Combine this with the extensive use of tariffs, state
   funding of industry and infrastructure among many other forms of state
   aid to capitalists and we have a situation were capitalism was imposed
   on a pre-capitalist nation at the behest of the wealthy elite by the
   state, as was the case with all other countries.

F.8.6 How did working people view the rise of capitalism?

   The best example of how hated capitalism was can be seen by the rise
   and spread of the labour and socialist movements, in all their many
   forms, across the world. It is no coincidence that the development of
   capitalism also saw the rise of socialist theories. Nor was it a
   coincidence that the rising workers movement was subjected to extensive
   state repression, with unions, strikes and other protests being
   systematically repressed. Only once capital was firmly entrenched in
   its market position could economic power come to replace political
   force (although, of course, that always remained ready in the
   background to defend capitalist property and power).

   The rise of unions, socialism and other reform movements and their
   repression was a feature of all capitalist countries. While America is
   sometime portrayed as an exception to this, in reality that country was
   also marked by numerous popular movements which challenged the rise of
   capitalism and the transformation of social relationships within the
   economy from artisanal self-management to capitalist wage slavery. As
   in other countries, the state was always quick to support the
   capitalist class against their rebellious wage slaves, using first
   conspiracy and then anti-trust laws against working class people and
   their organisations. So, in order to fully understand how different
   capitalism was from previous economic systems, we will consider early
   capitalism in the US, which for many right-"libertarians" is the
   example of the "capitalism-equals-freedom" argument.

   Early America was pervaded by artisan production -- individual
   ownership of the means of production. Unlike capitalism, this system is
   not marked by the separation of the worker from the means of life. Most
   people did not have to work for another, and so did not. As Jeremy
   Brecher notes, in 1831 the "great majority of Americans were farmers
   working their own land, primarily for their own needs. Most of the rest
   were self-employed artisans, merchants, traders, and professionals.
   Other classes -- employees and industrialists in the North, slaves and
   planters in the South -- were relatively small. The great majority of
   Americans were independent and free from anybody's command." [Strike!,
   p. xxi] So the availability of land ensured that in America, slavery
   and indentured servants were the only means by which capitalists could
   get people to work for them. This was because slaves and servants were
   not able to leave their masters and become self-employed farmers or
   artisans. As noted in the [17]last section this material base was,
   ironically, acknowledged by Rothbard but the implications for freedom
   when it disappeared was not. While he did not ponder what would happen
   when that supply of land ended and whether the libertarian aspects of
   early American society would survive, contemporary politicians, bosses,
   and economists did. Unsurprisingly, they turned to the state to ensure
   that capitalism grew on the grave of artisan and farmer property.

   Toward the middle of the 19th century the economy began to change.
   Capitalism began to be imported into American society as the
   infrastructure was improved by state aid and tariff walls were
   constructed which allowed home-grown manufacturing companies to
   develop. Soon, due to (state-supported) capitalist competition, artisan
   production was replaced by wage labour. Thus "evolved" modern
   capitalism. Many workers understood, resented, and opposed their
   increasing subjugation to their employers, which could not be
   reconciled with the principles of freedom and economic independence
   that had marked American life and had sunk deeply into mass
   consciousness during the days of the early economy. In 1854, for
   example, a group of skilled piano makers hoped that "the day is far
   distant when they [wage earners] will so far forget what is due to
   manhood as to glory in a system forced upon them by their necessity and
   in opposition to their feelings of independence and self-respect. May
   the piano trade be spared such exhibitions of the degrading power of
   the day [wage] system." [quoted by Brecher and Costello, Common Sense
   for Hard Times, p. 26]

   Clearly the working class did not consider working for a daily wage, in
   contrast to working for themselves and selling their own product, to be
   a step forward for liberty or individual dignity. The difference
   between selling the product of one's labour and selling one's labour
   (i.e. oneself) was seen and condemned ("[w]hen the producer . . . sold
   his product, he retained himself. But when he came to sell his labour,
   he sold himself . . . the extension [of wage labour] to the skilled
   worker was regarded by him as a symbol of a deeper change." [Norman
   Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860, p. xiv]). Indeed, one group of
   workers argued that they were "slaves in the strictest sense of the
   word" as they had "to toil from the rising of the sun to the going down
   of the same for our masters -- aye, masters, and for our daily bread."
   [quoted by Ware, Op. Cit., p. 42] Another group argued that "the
   factory system contains in itself the elements of slavery, we think no
   sound reasoning can deny, and everyday continues to add power to its
   incorporate sovereignty, while the sovereignty of the working people
   decreases in the same degree." [quoted by Brecher and Costello, Op.
   Cit., p. 29] For working class people, free labour meant something
   radically different than that subscribed to by employers and
   economists. For workers, free labour meant economic independence
   through the ownership of productive equipment or land. For bosses, it
   meant workers being free of any alternative to consenting to
   authoritarian organisations within their workplaces -- if that required
   state intervention (and it did), then so be it.

   The courts, of course, did their part in ensuring that the law
   reflected and bolstered the power of the boss rather than the worker.
   "Acting piecemeal," summarises Tomlins, "the law courts and law writers
   of the early republic built their approach to the employment
   relationship on the back of English master/servant law. In the process,
   they vested in the generality of nineteenth-century employers a
   controlling authority over the employees founded upon the
   pre-industrial master's claim to property in his servant's personal
   services." Courts were "having recourse to master/servant's language of
   power and control" as the "preferred strategy for dealing with the
   employment relation" and so advertised their conclusion that
   "employment relations were properly to be conceived of as generically
   hierarchical." [Op. Cit., p. 231 and p. 225] As we noted in [18]last
   section the courts, judges and jurists acted to outlaw unions as
   conspiracies and force workers to work the full length of their
   contracts. In addition, they also reduced employer liability in
   industrial accidents (which, of course, helped lower the costs of
   investment as well as operating costs).

   Artisans and farmers correctly saw this as a process of downward
   mobility toward wage labour and almost as soon as there were wage
   workers, there were strikes, machine breaking, riots, unions and many
   other forms of resistance. John Zerzan's argument that there was a
   "relentless assault on the worker's historical rights to free time,
   self-education, craftsmanship, and play was at the heart of the rise of
   the factory system" is extremely accurate. [Elements of Refusal, p.
   105] And it was an assault that workers resisted with all their might.
   In response to being subjected to the wage labour, workers rebelled and
   tried to organise themselves to fight the powers that be and to replace
   the system with a co-operative one. As the printer's union argued, its
   members "regard such an organisation [a union] not only as an agent of
   immediate relief, but also as an essential to the ultimate destruction
   of those unnatural relations at present subsisting between the
   interests of the employing and the employed classes . . . when labour
   determines to sell itself no longer to speculators, but to become its
   own employer, to own and enjoy itself and the fruit thereof, the
   necessity for scales of prices will have passed away and labour will be
   forever rescued from the control of the capitalist." [quoted by Brecher
   and Costello, Op. Cit., pp. 27-28]

   Little wonder, then, why wage labourers considered capitalism as a
   modified form of slavery and why the term "wage slavery" became so
   popular in the labour and anarchist movements. It was just reflecting
   the feelings of those who experienced the wages system at first hand
   and who created the labour and socialist movements in response. As
   labour historian Norman Ware notes, the "term 'wage slave' had a much
   better standing in the forties [of the 19th century] than it has today.
   It was not then regarded as an empty shibboleth of the soap-box orator.
   This would suggest that it has suffered only the normal degradation of
   language, has become a cliche, not that it is a grossly misleading
   characterisation." [Op. Cit., p. xvf] It is no coincidence that, in
   America, the first manufacturing complex in Lowell was designed to
   symbolise its goals and its hierarchical structure nor that its design
   was emulated by many of the penitentiaries, insane asylums, orphanages
   and reformatories of the period. [Bookchin, The Ecology of Freedom, p.
   392]

   These responses of workers to the experience of wage labour is
   important as they show that capitalism is by no means "natural." The
   fact is the first generation of workers tried to avoid wage labour is
   at all possible -- they hated the restrictions of freedom it imposed
   upon them. Unlike the bourgeoisie, who positively eulogised the
   discipline they imposed on others. As one put it with respect to one
   corporation in Lowell, New England, the factories at Lowell were "a new
   world, in its police it is imperium in imperio. It has been said that
   an absolute despotism, justly administered . . . would be a perfect
   government . . . For at the same time that it is an absolute despotism,
   it is a most perfect democracy. Any of its subjects can depart from it
   at pleasure . . . Thus all the philosophy of mind which enter vitally
   into government by the people . . . is combined with a set of rule
   which the operatives have no voice in forming or administering, yet of
   a nature not merely perfectly just, but human, benevolent, patriarchal
   in a high degree." Those actually subjected to this "benevolent"
   dictatorship had a somewhat different perspective. Workers, in
   contrast, were perfectly aware that wage labour was wage slavery --
   that they were decidedly unfree during working hours and subjected to
   the will of another. The workers therefore attacked capitalism
   precisely because it was despotism ("monarchical principles on
   democratic soil") and thought they "who work in the mills ought to own
   them." Unsurprisingly, when workers did revolt against the benevolent
   despots, the workers noted how the bosses responded by marking "every
   person with intelligence and independence . . . He is a suspected
   individual and must be either got rid of or broken in. Hundreds of
   honest labourers have been dismissed from employment . . . because they
   have been suspected of knowing their rights and daring to assert them."
   [quoted by Ware, Op. Cit., p. 78, p. 79 and p. 110]

   While most working class people now are accustomed to wage labour
   (while often hating their job) the actual process of resistance to the
   development of capitalism indicates well its inherently authoritarian
   nature and that people were not inclined to accept it as "economic
   freedom." Only once other options were closed off and capitalists given
   an edge in the "free" market by state action did people accept and
   become accustomed to wage labour. As E. P. Thompson notes, for British
   workers at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries, the
   "gap in status between a 'servant,' a hired wage-labourer subject to
   the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might
   'come and go' as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood
   rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other.
   And, in the value system of the community, those who resisted
   degradation were in the right." [The Making of the English Working
   Class, p. 599]

   Opposition to wage labour and factory fascism was/is widespread and
   seems to occur wherever it is encountered. "Research has shown",
   summarises William Lazonick, "that the 'free-born Englishman' of the
   eighteenth century -- even those who, by force of circumstance, had to
   submit to agricultural wage labour -- tenaciously resisted entry into
   the capitalist workshop." [Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor, p.
   37] British workers shared the dislike of wage labour of their American
   cousins. A "Member of the Builders' Union" in the 1830s argued that the
   trade unions "will not only strike for less work, and more wages, but
   will ultimately abolish wages, become their own masters and work for
   each other; labour and capital will no longer be separate but will be
   indissolubly joined together in the hands of workmen and work-women."
   [quoted by E. P. Thompson, Op. Cit., p. 912] This perspective inspired
   the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1834 which had the
   "two-fold purpose of syndicalist unions -- the protection of the
   workers under the existing system and the formation of the nuclei of
   the future society" when the unions "take over the whole industry of
   the country." [Geoffrey Ostergaard, The Tradition of Workers' Control,
   p. 133] As Thompson noted, "industrial syndicalism" was a major theme
   of this time in the labour movement. "When Marx was still in his
   teens," he noted, British trade unionists had "developed, stage by
   stage, a theory of syndicalism" in which the "unions themselves could
   solve the problem of political power" along with wage slavery. This
   vision was lost "in the terrible defeats of 1834 and 1835." [Op. Cit.,
   p. 912 and p. 913] In France, the mutualists of Lyons had come to the
   same conclusions, seeking "the formation of a series of co-operative
   associations" which would "return to the workers control of their
   industry." Proudhon would take up this theme, as would the anarchist
   movement he helped create. [K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Jospeh Proudhon
   and the Rise of French Republican Socialism, pp. 162-3] Similar
   movements and ideas developed elsewhere, as capitalism was imposed
   (subsequent developments were obviously influenced by the socialist
   ideas which had arisen earlier and so were more obviously shaped by
   anarchist and Marxist ideas).

   This is unsurprising, the workers then, who had not been swallowed up
   whole by the industrial revolution, could make critical comparisons
   between the factory system and what preceded it. "Today, we are so
   accustomed to this method of production [capitalism] and its
   concomitant, the wage system, that it requires quite an effort of
   imagination to appreciate the significance of the change in terms of
   the lives of ordinary workers . . . the worker became alienated . . .
   from the means of production and the products of his labour . . . In
   these circumstances, it is not surprising that the new socialist
   theories proposed an alternative to the capitalist system which would
   avoid this alienation." While wage slavery may seem "natural" today,
   the first generation of wage labourers saw the transformation of the
   social relationships they experienced in work, from a situation in
   which they controlled their own work (and so themselves) to one in
   which others controlled them, and they did not like it. However, while
   many modern workers instinctively hate wage labour and having bosses,
   without the awareness of some other method of working, many put up with
   it as "inevitable." The first generation of wage labourers had the
   awareness of something else (although a flawed and limited something
   else as it existed in a hierarchical and class system) and this gave
   then a deep insight into the nature of capitalism and produced a deeply
   radical response to it and its authoritarian structures. Anarchism
   (like other forms of socialism) was born of the demand for liberty and
   resistance to authority which capitalism had provoked in its wage
   slaves. With our support for workers' self-management of production,
   "as in so many others, the anarchists remain guardians of the
   libertarian aspirations which moved the first rebels against the
   slavery inherent in the capitalist mode of production." [Ostergaard,
   Op. Cit., p. 27 and p. 90]

   State action was required produce and protect the momentous changes in
   social relations which are central to the capitalist system. However,
   once capital has separated the working class from the means of life,
   then it no longer had to rely as much on state coercion. With the
   choice now between wage slavery or starving, then the appearance of
   voluntary choice could be maintained as economic power was/is usually
   effective enough to ensure that state violence could be used as a last
   resort. Coercive practices are still possible, of course, but market
   forces are usually sufficient as the market is usually skewed against
   the working class. However, the role of the state remains a key to
   understanding capitalism as a system rather than just specific periods
   of it. This is because, as we stressed in [19]section D.1, state action
   is not associated only with the past, with the transformation from
   feudalism to capitalism. It happens today and it will continue to
   happen as long as capitalism continues.

   Far from being a "natural" development, then, capitalism was imposed on
   a society by state action, by and on behalf of ruling elites. Those
   working class people alive at the time viewed it as "unnatural
   relations" and organised to overcome it. It is from such movements that
   all the many forms of socialism sprang, including anarchism. This is
   the case with the European anarchism associated with Proudhon, Bakunin
   and Kropotkin as well as the American individualist anarchism of Warren
   and Tucker. The links between anarchism and working class rebellion
   against the autocracy of capital and the state is reflected not only in
   our theory and history, but also in our anarchist symbols. The Black
   Flag, for example, was first raised by rebel artisans in France and its
   association with labour insurrection was the reason why anarchists took
   it up as our symbol (see the appendix on [20]"The Symbols of Anarchy").
   So given both the history of capitalism and anarchism, it becomes
   obvious any the latter has always opposed the former. It is why
   anarchists today still seek to encourage the desire and hope for
   political and economic freedom rather than the changing of masters we
   have under capitalism. Anarchism will continue as long as these
   feelings and hopes still exist and they will remain until such time as
   we organise and abolish capitalism and the state.

References

   1. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secD1.html
   2. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB2.html#secb25
   3. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secC2.html
   4. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html#secf83
   5. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secC10.html
   6. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html#secf85
   7. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secBcon.html
   8. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secFcon.html
   9. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB2.html#secb25
  10. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secI7.html
  11. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html#secf85
  12. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secC9.html
  13. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html#secf85
  14. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html#secf85
  15. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secB2.html#secb25
  16. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html#secf83
  17. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html#secf85
  18. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secF8.html#secf85
  19. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/secD1.html
  20. file://localhost/home/mauro/baku/debianize/maint/anarchy/append2.html
