Infamous British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher espoused a fusionist ideology which sought to weld pseudo-individualism to the traditionalist collectivism of the nuclear family and the nation state in a manner not unlike her American counterpart Ronald Reagan. Unsurprisingly, this ideological chimera led to an incoherent world view that rhetorically championed the freedom of the individual, while in practice emboldening corporations to pillage the working class by destroying labor unions and simultaneously upholding every conceivable capitalist monopoly. The end result of this was the destruction of individual freedom for many working class people and the damaging of working class families for generations. This is the sales-pitch which allowed her to con millions into supporting the corporate pillaging of their own pockets:
I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.
Certain aspects of this rant are agreeable on the surface, hence the widespread appeal. But don’t get too excited about my tepid praise of old Maggie, because all demagogues mix in a little truth with their lies. Other despotic minds, like that of one Vladimir Lenin, pointed out obvious truths as well; capitalism exploits, empires conquer, the working classes suffer. It’s all true. I don’t deny any of those observations just because Lenin happened to agree with them. However, it doesn’t follow that government is the solution to the problems caused by capitalism and imperialism, just as it doesn’t follow that the denial of an egalitarian society is the solution to the problems caused by government. Why? Because society is the antithesis of government, not its cohort.
Thatcher and her fellow travelers correctly gestured to the observation that government is indeed an ineffective tool for improving society. That’s one of the many reasons anarchists have always opposed government, and they made this observation long before corporate co-opters like Thatcher rolled around. It is also unjust, as Thatcherites and Reaganists loved to point out, that one group of individuals should be forced by the state to pay for the welfare of another group of individuals. Similarly to Herbert Spencer before them though, what they never dared to question is why the state should then be justified in its coercive activities that uphold the privileges of the rich which create the need for welfare programs in the first place. If the rich shouldn’t be directly taxed by the state to support the poor, why should the poor be indirectly taxed through rent, interest, and stolen surplus value to support the rich? All of those indirect taxes on the poor are made possible by the same coercive state apparatus that makes direct taxation possible. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Maggie!
Thatcher claimed the welfare state is a burden on society and then subsequently denied the existence of society. That’s an interesting position to take. To me it sounds as if she’s one step from evoking Max Stirner. From there it’s worth asking, what even is society, and does it exist? Is society just another one of Stirner’s spooks,a specter of the mind? A quick Google search to define society yields the following definition: “the aggregate of people living together in a more or less ordered community.” Actually, that’s not a bad definition, and it’s something I can get behind since anarchists do indeed support order if arrived at voluntarily. As for community, Google again comes to the rescue; community is “a feeling of fellowship with others, as a result of sharing common attitudes, interests, and goals.” Fellowship is a synonym of solidarity, and if solidarity is arrived at by sharing common attitudes it implies free association, all things I love!
I see no problem then with ordered communities, or society for that matter. However defining something doesn’t mean it actually exists, but more on that later. What then is society’s relationship with the state and why is it the antithesis of the state as I claimed earlier? I believe that my favorite cantankerous old man, Benjamin Tucker (as opposed to my least favorite grumpy old lady, Margaret Thatcher) had something to say about the state and society:
The question, then, is whether the State is a concrete organism. The Anarchists claim that it is not. If Mr. Read thinks that it is, the onus probandi is upon him. I judge that his error arises from a confusion of the State with society. That society is a concrete organism the Anarchists do not deny; on the contrary, they insist upon it. Consequently they have no intention or desire to abolish it. They know that its life is inseparable from the life of individuals; that it is impossible to destroy one without destroying the other. But, though society cannot be destroyed, it can be greatly hampered and impeded in its operations, much to the disadvantage of the individuals composing it, and it meets its chief impediment in the State. The State, unlike society, is a discrete organism. If it should be destroyed to-morrow, individuals would still continue to exist. Production, exchange, and association would go on as before, but much more freely, and all those social functions upon which the individual is dependent would operate in his behalf more usefully than ever. The individual is not related to the State as the tiger’s paw is related to the tiger. Kill the tiger, and the tiger’s paw no longer performs its office; kill the State, and the individual still lives and satisfies his wants. As for society, the Anarchists would not kill it if they could, and could not if they would.
And thus it should become apparent how horrifically confused, or rather manipulative, old Thatcher really was by denying society in the name of individuality and independence. Society is what enables the individual to be autonomous through free contract, at least when it is not impeded from doing so.
Thatcher isn’t wrong when she, and others of her ilk, say things like “no government can do anything except through people”. That much is true, but they conveniently leave out the fact that the government also creates conditions which prevent society from providing housing, in turn leading to desperate masses demanding that it step in to correct the issue. At best, myopic attacks on the welfare state which ignore the many state-sponsored privileges of the rich merely restart the cycle which led to people demanding welfare programs in the first place.
The job of the government is to take away independence from individuals that they would otherwise acquire through society by stripping society of its necessary functions and placing them in the hands of one elite bureaucracy or another. Republicans, Democrats, Marxist-Leninists, fascists, national socialists, social democrats, and even the libertarian-minarchists of the U.S. Libertarian Party can all function as the bureaucratic elite which strips society of its agency. And once they are in charge of the agency stripping apparatus that is the state, none of them will do a damn thing to rectify the historical injustice of land enclosure, thus continuing the unending cycle of mass dispossession from land and housing, demands for welfare to compensate, and the eventual repeal of any welfare laws that may be passed.
There is nothing wrong with asking society to provide housing, so long as it is done through the good will of voluntarily acting individuals. The problem is, as Tucker points out, that the state impedes society, and in this particular instance it impedes society from housing the unhoused. As long as the state upholds the land monopoly, society will be impeded from providing housing. In a proper society, where land and natural resources are free to all, it is highly probable that individuals would act upon their social instincts and naturally work together without compulsion to build one another houses just as they had done before land enclosure. Failing that, individual acts of subsistence farming upon unoccupied land would be an option. Thus there would be no need to ask the state to provide housing.
To be clear, the rectification of land enclosures does not imply any authoritarian communist or even anarchist-communist schema, though the latter option would not be excluded as an option in a society based on free contract. In a market freed from the great capitalistic monopolies; the land monopoly, the money monopoly, the tariff monopoly, the intellectual property monopoly, individuals would have a far greater wealth of time and money to spare in addition to their newly acquired ability to freely access natural resources. We would not be living paycheck to paycheck because greedy landlords would not be able to rob us of a large percentage of our monthly income through the state granted privilege that is absentee property ownership. We wouldn’t have to buy undeveloped land from absentee speculators either, as it would be free to all to build upon. We wouldn’t have to contend with employers stealing our surplus value that we generate at work since we would be sole proprietors or worker-owners of cooperative firms. We wouldn’t be raked over the coals by high interest loans that we begrudgingly accept out of desperation from the great monopolists at Chase and Huntington because we would get our loans from mutual banks that operate at a cost, not profit. In this context, everyone would be far richer!
In such a world, why would society not provide housing for people? I know that if I had the extra income, and if my own house was secured I would gladly get together with my neighbors to build a new house on an unoccupied piece of land for someone in need. It’s in the self-interest of each and every person to engage in mutual aid for the simple reason that if you help others, they will help you in return. In addition it can be a rewarding experience that can provide meaning to many in a world that is increasingly bereft of it.
How about it then, does society exist or is it a specter of the mind? Unfortunately I don’t agree with Tucker in his assertion that society cannot be destroyed. Society is a network of ordered communities, communities are relationships built upon solidarity. Last time I checked, there was very little order or solidarity present in modern civilization. I believe that society has been destroyed and that the state has been the agent of its demise. Thatcher then was correct that society does not exist, if only because her and her predecessors/descendents (meaning the political class in general) destroyed it. To be clear, the destruction of society cannot be placed on one government in particular, all governments are responsible, including Thatcher’s.
What does exist then, if not society? The state and capitalism, which have formed a unitary construct we can accurately call state-capitalism. The system of state-capitalism has reigned supreme since Otto Von Bismarck first conceived of it as a tool to suppress the German labor movement via the twin methods of the carrot and the stick [1]. State capitalism comes in many forms, the most deceptive of which seem to be populist governments which denounce one half of the problem while championing the other as its solution.
The “small government” fusionism of Thatcher and Reagan laid the groundwork for vulgar libertarianism by denouncing government and proclaiming capitalism as its antithesis. Meanwhile they omitted the fact that capitalism cannot exist without government. So how then can capitalism be the answer to government? The social democracy of Freidrich Ebert and the Bolshevism of Vladimir Lenin denounced capitalism while championing government as the solution, again falling into the same fallacy but from the opposite perspective, not taking into account the fact that capitalism only exists because it is propped up by government [2]. How then can government be the solution to capitalism?
Perhaps the only governments which are honest about the relationship are those that proudly proclaim the status quo. Their line is that “hey, at least we aren’t the extremists, things could be worse! Capitalism and government are the best we can do.” Centrist governments wear state-capitalism on their sleeve, but being honest about your awful system is not a sign of virtue, it’s a sign of desperation and fear. The populist governments that centrists (correctly) fear on the other hand hide behind half truth. They ride popular discontent with either aspect of the state-capitalist system into power while never actually doing anything substantial about either; much less acknowledging the interdependent nature of the two things. One may proclaim to be left wing, the other right wing. One may proclaim to be socialist, the other capitalist. One may proclaim to believe in liberty, the other in equality. But the differences are superficial. All governments suppress the labor movement, enclose the land, restrict free exchange, subsidize corporations, tax the poor, and uphold the hierarchies between employer and employee. All governments are thus state-capitalist in practice regardless of their rhetorical camouflage or particular flavor.
The inevitable outcome of state-capitalism is a strangulation of society via a siphoning off of the requisite materials to the elite classes through rent, taxes, the theft of surplus value by the employing class, and imposition of interest by state-granted banking monopolies upon desperate loan recipients. Yes indeed, Margaret, people look to themselves first because they do not have the resources to look to others since the resources they might be willing to share have been stolen by one variety of state-capitalism or the other.
We don’t have ordered communities, so we don’t have society. And society can’t provide housing as it should, since it does not exist . As a result, the desperate individuals that old Maggie so loathed are forced to look to the state for assistance. Instead of society, we have isolated individuals that exist under a regime of chaos that has been imposed upon them by the state-capitalist machine. A true society is a self-ordered community founded on free contract, the best of which would secure liberty and equality for all its members. All we have right now though is a state which serves capitalists through talking puppets such as Thatcher, Reagan and their mutated offspring; Joe Biden and Donald Trump. It’s time to reconstitute society by establishing real communities based on mutual aid, free exchange, and solidarity.
Notes
- According to Smithsonian mag, Bismarck called the system “state socialism” saying “Call it socialism or whatever you like” and “It is the same to me.” The terms state capitalism and state socialism are more or less synonymous and in my opinion are deployed rather cynically by state actors to appeal to different demographics. If a ruler believes the populace will be more receptive to state-capitalism, that term will be used, if a ruler believes the populace will be more receptive to state-socialism, that term will be used. During the 1917 revolution, Lenin coined the term state-capitalism, claiming that state capitalism was a step towards socialism:
The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.
Unfortunately, the introduction of state capitalism with us is not proceeding as quickly as we would like it. For example, so far we have not had a single important concession, and without foreign capital to help develop our economy, the latter’s quick rehabilitation is inconceivable.
I believe the term state capitalism is the most accurate way to describe the various systems employed by Bismarck, Lenin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, ect. All of these systems combine the state and capital into one unified force in order to control the labor movement. I do not wish to imply that all of these governments are exactly the same, certainly the degree of civil liberties and centralization varied wildly within them, however the parallels are undeniable. State-capitalism should be seen as a broad phenomena encompassing a wide variety of arrangements that combine paternalistic labor relations and a degree of state management of the economy, both of which serve to render the rate of exploitation sustainable.
