State of Warfare

"Whoever says regulation says limitation: now conceive of limiting privilege before it existed?
... It would be an effect without a cause" and so "regulation was a
corrective to privilege" and not vice versa. [P-J Proudhon, _System of Economic Contradictions_, p. 371]

This quote shows the fallacious nature of the Original Position hypothesis or a State of Nature whereby the populace voluntarily surrendered to authoritarian rule, politically and economically.
The role of the state is to increase the wealth of the rich wherever possible while making it appear to be the result of “popular will”.

If there were no such thing as poverty, then there would be no need for government. Poverty is the raison d’etre of government’s existence; it could never allow a “levelling down”, and this is why states and corporations employ thousands of intellectuals to justify not spending money on social justice programmes. Central co-ordination is “totalitarian” when applied to social welfare programmes, but keep that money coming in to build more bombs and prisons while we turn a blind eye. Who would bite the hand that feeds them?

"Government cannot
want society to break up, for it would mean that it and the dominant class
would be deprived of sources of exploitation; nor can it leave society to
maintain itself without official intervention, for then people would
soon realise that government serves only to defend property owners. . .
and they would hasten to rid themselves of both." [Errico Malatesta,
_Anarchy_, p. 22]

“In the nineteenth century, states only turned to laissez-faire once they
could benefit from it and had a strong enough economy to survive it…

“The reason for the return of protectionist legislation was the Depression
of 1873-86, which marked the end of the first experiment with pure
economic liberalism. Paradoxically, then, the attempt to liberalise the
markets led to more regulation. In light of our previous analysis, this
is not surprising. Neither the owners of the country nor the politicians
desired to see society destroyed, the result to which unhindered
laissez-faire leads” Anarchist FAQ

"The practical evidence [is] that whatever
governments do is always motivated by the desire to dominate, and is
always geared to defending, extending and perpetuating its privileges
and those of the class of which it is both the representative and
defender." [Malatesta]


“Contrary to conventional wisdom, state intervention will always
be associated with capitalism due to:
(1) its authoritarian nature;
(2) its inability to prevent the anti-social results of the competitive market;
(3) its fallacious assumption that society should be "an accessory to
the economic system";
(4) the class interests of the ruling elite; and
(5) the need to impose its authoritarian social relationships upon an
unwilling population in the first place.

State intervention is as natural to capitalism as wage labour.” The FAQ


The social organisation, by the presence of violent coercion, is the dictator or instigator, of the economical situation.
This view is probably best explained by considering State Police/Armed forces. By any definition, presumably, members of the security forces are somewhat outside normal economic activity. However, in actually being paid for serving the Government, they are engaged in economic activity. In having a wage set by the State, the State is in effect determining that a soldier’s labour is worth a determined percentage of that of an ordinary worker. In repressive regimes, special police forces are paid several times the wage of the average worker in order to maintain loyalty to the State. Also, in certain Third World countries, members of the armed forces are little more than “legally armed bandits”, robbing or in some cases raping the poor (with the tacit consent of the males) to compensate for missing or inadequate wages.
In this fashion, all governments impose some form of Command Economy in order to subjugate the Poor.
By actually employing paid security forces all states directly affect the market they all pretend to worship by creating an artificial one.


“To expect that a community would remain indifferent to the scourge of
unemployment, dangerous working conditions, 16-hour working days, the
shifting of industries and occupations, and the moral and psychological
disruption accompanying them -- merely because economic effects, in the
long run, might be better -- is an absurdity. Similarly, for workers to
remain indifferent to, for example, poor working conditions, peacefully
waiting for a new boss to offer them better conditions, or for citizens
to wait passively for capitalists to start voluntarily acting responsibly
toward the environment, is to assume a servile and apathetic role
for humanity. Luckily, labour refuses to be a commodity and citizens
refuse to stand idly by while the planet's ecosystems are destroyed.

Therefore state intervention occurs as a form of protection against the
workings of the market. As capitalism is based on atomising society in
the name of "freedom" on the competitive market, it is hardly surprising that
defence against the anti-social workings of the market should take
statist forms -- there being few other structures capable of providing
such defence (as such social institutions have been undermined, if not
crushed, by the rise of capitalism in the first place). Thus, ironically,
"individualism" produces a "collectivist" tendency within society as
capitalism destroys communal forms of social organisation in favour of
ones based on abstract individualism, authority, and hierarchy -- all
qualities embodied in the state. In a free (i.e. communal) society,
social self-defence would not be statist but would be similar in nature
to trade unionism and co-operatives -- individuals working together in
voluntary associations to ensure a free and just society….

“In the case of Britain and a host of other countries (and more recently in
the cases of Japan and the Newly Industrialising Countries of the Far
East, like Korea) state intervention was, funnily enough, the key to
development and success in the "free market." In other "developing"
countries which have had the misfortune to be subjected to "free-market
reforms" (e.g. neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programs) rather
than following the interventionist Japanese and Korean models, the
results have been devastating for the vast majority, with drastic
increases in poverty, homelessness, malnutrition, etc. (for the elite,the results are somewhat different of course).” The FAQ