keepcarrot, 1 year ago

How are Microsoft and CNN part of the state? Aren’t they just providing a service in exchange for money, in the same way a farmer, an actor or a mechanic does?

Obviously we’re talking about different ideas here. Microsoft, for instance, pays for enforcement of copyright (a relatively modern invention) and gets profits from that enforcement (e.g. through corporate deals, sponsorships, software ecosystems etc), which maintains class character. The owners of Microsoft sit around and do nothing (hypothetically), and the systems surrounding them (“the state”) funnel money up to them, that money being a representation of the power and labour of people buying and using Microsoft products (often without choice; I don’t get to choose which OS my workplace uses, for instance, but I also play video games which can be jank with various linux OSes etc etc). It is in Microsoft’s best interests to maintain this class character of society, thus they will lobby the government to defend their interests, fund op-eds to say “tech workers unionising is bad, actually”, pay for private security, bankroll candidates in local sherriffs elections etc etc. The fact that they are privately owned and the money and power are “private” only really explains where the money/power goes, it doesn’t explain Microsoft’s behaviour. The same with CNN except with different specifics.

I do know a couple of leftists that complain about using the word “state” for this, since it has a different definition in common parlance (usually equivalent to the government or nation-state), so it could just be semantics. But if you’re talking to a left anarchist about states, that’s what they mean. I also realise that this means that your local fish and chips shop owner is a part of “the state”, but the municipal work guy who fills in potholes for the city council isn’t, at least in that conception. I’m not really going to argue these points, just hopefully building some understanding to what anarchists (except ancaps) mean when they talk about the state.

Most people aren’t washing windows for the love of washing windows. Perhaps it would be true if all their needs were met (say, food security, housing etc etc), then your window washing friend taking money to wash windows so he can buy warhammer miniatures or something. Erm… What follows isn’t an argument, but more just a scenario to explain the view. Again, I’m not super interested in arguing the point.

Imagine there is a village where everyone is hungry except one person. That one person owns all the grain. How he acquired the grain is irrelevant, what matters now is he has all the grain in a legal sense. Maybe he inherited from its previous owner. “Give me everything you own, and I will feed you”, he says. The villagers balk. It is a long journey to the nearest town, too long for many of them for they have been hungry for a while. Some of them give up their homes in exchange for grain. They continue living there, but agree to pay future rent. For the others, the situation becomes more dire as the days pass. People are rapidly losing weight, trying to fill their stomachs with a mixture of sawdust and water. The grain lord ups the ante “Give me everything you produce in the future, as well as everything you own right now.” Again the villagers balk, but some people sell themselves into more explicit serfdom than the people from before. and so on and so on until the villagers are selling their firstborns to the grain lord who haven’t even been born yet. I got bored of writing this. At some point or another, the villagers just take the grain and fight off the lord if he tries to stop them. His property hoarding requires violence to maintain regardless of how he acquired that property, unless you consider violence against property to be worse than violence against people (which, uh… idk). Ergo, it is violent.

The point being that in this scenario, everything is “freely” given, in a legalistic sense, but is extremely exploitative in any other sense. The right libertarian viewing this as just is… Well, most people don’t act like this in their personal lives. If a friend or member of their community is hungry and they have lots of food to share, they will share it quite freely. It is the state (in the anarchist’s view) that obfuscates our local community relationships where we see ourselves as so separate that would not give spare food someone in our communities if they were hungry (that said, our cities are very large, something about urbanist critique here). Like, my loser brother who fucks up everything is still welcome to share my pot roast tonight, though I’m probably not going to invest in any of his ventures per se.

I think, also, that while anarchists view the hoarding as violent, they also view the source of all capital as violent as well. For instance, would Standard Oil or US Steel have been as profitable or even have existed if the United States’ land had never been violently appropriated from the native societies that already existed there? A lot of the initial wealth even before the colonial era was squatted on by descendants of warlords who ran what we’d call “protection rackets” (feudalism). How much of any of the wealth that exists is “legitimate”?

Again, I don’t really follow this political view anymore, so I’m not going to get into the nitty gritty of arguing any of these points. These scenarios are just for helping get into the mindset of anarchism. If you want a decent primer to the different forms property and ownership can take, you could read Debt: The First 5000 Years which has very accessible anthropological discussion of many different societies throughout history (including free market arguments in the first Islamic Empire).