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Title: Mutualism and the State Author: Kevin Carson Date: March 1, 2005 Language: en Topics: mutualism, the State Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/03/mutualism-and-state.html
Pierre Ducasse has some kind words for mutualism as a form of social and
economic organization. He goes on to add:
However, I still believe that all trends of anarchism underestimate the
necessary roles of the State. Even in a grass-root, cooperative economy,
we would still need to offer public services like health and education,
redistribute some income, regulate the market, protect common good like
the environment, apply macroeconomic policies. Nothing can convince me
that these aspects can be held by any other organization than the State.
Unless anybody could provide historical examples...
Unfortunately, historical examples are pretty thin on the ground. Since
the rise of the state five thousand (give or take) years ago, that
portion of humankind organized on the basis of city life, division of
labor, and complex forms of production has, for all intents and
purposes, lived universally under the government of territorial states.
Of course, that same portion of humanity has also lived in exploitative
class societies. Think there could be a connection? Anyone who points to
the lack of historical precedents for an advanced society living without
a state as evidence of its impracticality, it seems, is hoist on his own
petard. One can argue on identical grounds that, because it has never
existed hitherto, a complex society cannot exist in which the producing
classes are not milked like cattle for the support of parasitic ruling
classes.
To take Ducasse’s objections individually, however, there is no logical
reason that any of the functions he mentions requires a state. The
supposed necessity for a state to remedy diverse evils, indeed, is to a
large extent the direct result of conditions created by the state in the
first place. Without the state’s current redistribution of income from
producers to landlords, capitalists and bureaucrats, the polarization of
income that prompts calls for “progressive” redistribution wouldn’t have
arisen to begin with. And in a society without extremes of wealth and
destitution, the vast majority of people would have the means to
organize their own health and education services. Besides that, in a
society where producers kept their full product and lived in
decentralized, organic communities and extended families, social
networks would likely exist to provide charitably for those few who were
genuinely incapable of producing for themselves. As Joe Peacott argued
in “Individualism and Inequality,”
...economic inequality would not have the same significance in a
non-capitalist anarchist society that it does in today’s societies.
The differences in wealth that arise in an individualist community would
likely be relatively small. Without the ability to profit from the labor
of others, generate interest from providing credit, or extort rent from
letting out land or property, individuals would not be capable of
generating the huge quantities of assets that people can in a capitalist
system. Furthermore, the anarchist with more things does not have them
at the expense of another, since they are the result of the ownerÂąs own
effort. If someone with less wealth wishes to have more, they can work
more, harder, or better. There is no injustice in one person working 12
hours a day and six days a week in order to buy a boat, while another
chooses to work three eight hour days a week and is content with a less
extravagant lifestyle. If one can generate income only by hard work,
there is an upper limit to the number and kind of things one can buy and
own.
More important, though, than the actual amount of economic inequality
between individuals is whether the person who has more wealth thereby
acquires more power or advantage over others. In a statist world, one
can buy political favors with oneÂąs money and influence government
action affecting oneself and others. This would not be an option in an
anarchist society since there would be no government or other political
structure through which individuals or groups could coerce others and
use their greater wealth to further aggrandize themselves through
political means, as happens in a society of rulers and subjects....
As for those who produce little or nothing because of some disability,
there are other means of providing for the less fortunate than communal
economic arrangements. There is a long tradition of groups of
individuals taking care of sick, injured, and otherwise incapacitated
people through voluntary organizations from friendly societies to
cooperatives of various sorts to trade unions. People who value private
property are no less benevolent than those who favor free collectives,
and would figure out any number of ways to care for those in need of
assistance from others.
Although there is no example of a stateless society in historic times,
there are many examples of exploited and impoverished workers, even left
with only a fraction of their labor-product, nevertheless managing to
carry out mutual aid on a monumental scale through voluntary
associations of various sorts. The working classes’ self-organized
“welfare state” has been described, variously, by Kropotkin, Colin Ward,
E.P. Thompson, and David Beito. Imagine what they could do in a society
where labor kept its full product!
The same principle goes for regulation of the market. The evils that
call for regulation are mainly creations of the state itself. The state,
by subsidizing the centralization of the economy in large corporations,
has promoted demographic mobility and social atomization to pathological
levels. Without such centralizing tendencies, a much larger portion of
production and exchange would take place in decentralized markets
regulated by custom and face-to-face relations. The boom-bust cycle that
macroeconomic policy is adopted to regulate, likewise, results from the
state’s policies. The smaller and more decentralized the market, the
more stable and predictable it is from the standpoint of those
participating in it; as commodity markets become larger and more
anonymous, the harder it is for producers to tie their output to the
stable consumption patterns of a market known to them personally. And
the pattern of overproduction- underconsumption that causes the business
cycle, likewise, is a result of the divorce of labor from consumption.
Because the state transfers a part of labor’s product to parasitic
classes, as J.A. Hobson described it a century ago, levels of output are
divorced from consumption. When labor fully internalizes both the costs
and benefits of production, its output will reflect its judgment of its
own consumption needs.
As for the environment, most pollution takes place at present because
the state protects polluters from internalizing the cost of their own
malfeasance. Much (if not most) pollution is committed either by the
government itself, or on government land by politically connected
corporations given preferential access to that land with minimal
oversight. In addition, the power of local juries to enforce the common
law of public and private nuisances has been preempted and supplanted by
a much weaker regulatory state. Those corporate hog farms might find it
much harder to operate if the residents of a county, acting through the
free jury of their local defense association, could impose heavy civil
damages on it for fouling their wells and stinking up the surrounding
area. I expect that such damages would be much more severe than the
fines imposed by the EPA.
To sum up: in virtually every case Ducasse mentions, the problem is
currently made worse by the state. So we can say, perhaps
half-facetiously, that even if abolishing the state would not solve
income inequality, pollution, the healthcare and education crises, it is
at least a step in the right direction.
In the comment thread, Larry Gambone adds that the abolition of the
state is a long-term goal, and a direction in which to move:
...few, if any anarchists these days believe the state will be abolished
in one go. In fact, the complete abolition of the state is an ideal and
is therefore something that might not ever come about – the anarchist is
someone who seeks to minimize statism and maximize voluntary,
cooperative, self-managed and communitarian efforts and doesn’t really
worry too much about the distant ideal.
As Gustav Landauer argued (see Larry’s article on him), the gradual
abolition of the state and its replacement by voluntary associations is
something to be done one step at a time, as it becomes feasible.
Martin Buber, using Landauer’s conceptions, explains how the State
“overdetermines” the amount of coercion in a society. People living
together at a given time and in a given space are only to a certain
degree capable, of their own free will, of living together rightly;
...the degree of incapacity for a voluntary right order determines the
degree of legitimate compulsion. Nevertheless the de facto extent of the
State always exceeds more or less — and mostly very much exceeds — the
sort of State that would emerge from the degree of legitimate
compulsion. This constant difference (which results in what I call “the
excessive State”) between the State in principle and the State in fact
is explained by the historical circumstance that accumulated power does
not abdicate except under necessity. It resists any adaptation to the
increasing capacity for voluntary order so long as this increase fails
to exert sufficiently vigorous pressure on the power accumulated....
As voluntary associations take over the work of the state, workers have
an ever-greater portion of their labor-product available for their own
cooperative social services, and the populace recovers habits of
voluntary cooperation and mutual aid atrophied under centuries of social
atomization at the hands of the state, it will be possible to scale back
the state’s functions incrementally.
Pierre Ducasse, in response, denied that the abolition of the state
could be even an ultimate goal or an ideal. “In any society, we need
central institutions of power: and I’m still waiting to be convinced
otherwise. The question is what kind of State we want, not if we want a
State at all.”
I’m not sure how Pierre defines the state, or whether his definition
coincides with that common among individualist anarchists: an
organization which claims the sole right of defining and regulating
legitimate force in a particular territory, and of initiating force
against non-aggressors for the purpose of promoting the general welfare.
(Or, as Poul Anderson described it, an organization that reserves the
right to kill you if you disobey its commands.)
But we should be careful to distinguish the state from voluntary
associations for mutual defense. The state, uniquely, is characterized
by its claimed legal authority to initiate force on behalf of “society.”
But it is the inalienable right of every individual to take necessary
action to defend himself against aggression; and whatever is morally
legitimate for the individual acting alone is likewise legitimate for
any number of individuals, cooperating voluntarily. The only thing that
such associations may not do legitimately is initiate force against
third parties “for their own good,” or force them to pay for services
they did not request. The individual, in the last resort, is the final
judge of his own needs for self-defense. He has the right to take use
whatever defensive force is necessary, for example, to prevent negligent
or dangerous behavior on the part of his neighbor that puts him at risk.
For example, the individual has the right to intervene to prevent a
neighbor from polluting his groundwater, or using noxious chemicals that
drift across their common property line. And since such intervention is
legitimate for the individual, it is legitimate for individuals
associated for mutual defense to act in concert to prohibit pollution by
third parties that presents a genuine threat to their safety and
welfare.
Such voluntary associations, as Benjamin Tucker envisioned them, would
be successor organizations that remained when the state lost its
defining characteristics. The state would cease to impose its services
on unwilling consumers, or to assess taxes on those not willingly
relying on its services; and it would cease to prevent non-members from
establishing their own voluntary arrangements to provide the same
services. But aside from its loss of the power to initiate force for the
“general welfare” of the community, and to collect taxes from the
populace at large, the successor organizations might well perform their
functions in ways reminiscent of the old state. Mutual defense
associations might continue to serve a majority of the community who
willingly purchased their services, even operating on the basis of a
jury system and posse comitatus, and to enforce libertarian law and
safety codes against those whose actions threatened or harmed the
membership. They would coexist with smaller protection agencies
organized in competition with them, with neighborhood watch groups, and
individuals who preferred to rely entirely on their own ability to
defend their homes. The only cases in which they could act against
non-members would be when their membership was harmed or genuinely
threatened.
There is, therefore, no reason that a libertarian law code, enforced by
the juries of a local defense association, could not prohibit and punish
pollution or other harmful acts, without taking on the nature of a
“state.”