This is Richard Wolff from Democracy At Work, responding to another “Ask Prof Wolff” question
from our Patreon community. This question comes from Diego Guglielmi. It concerns Anarchism,
Anarcho-Capitalism, and Minarchism, which is a kind of notion of
minimizing government and the State, whereas Anarchism is a more, stronger version if you like,
of trying to literally eliminate the State, seeing the State as the problem.
And Diego Guglielmi asks me to comment on these tendencies, which he has heard about,
understandably, from a Libertarian friend. So let me talk a little bit about Anarchism.
It is an important social movement. It's been around quite a while, several centuries
at least, and it has precedence earlier than that. In the bluntest way possible,
let me describe it as a view that attributes many, if not most, of the problems of modern society
to the government, to the role played by the state, and argues that the solution to many of the
problems that plague us have to do with cutting the State down to size,
eliminating it or minimizing it. The State is the problem, and removing the State
as much as possible, is the solution. Anarchists, people who believe something along these lines,
have always been divided. They're not all of the same perspective with their anarchism.
You might say there's a left-wing Anarchism, and there's a right-wing Anarchism. The Libertarians
that we see and hear mostly around us in the United States are mostly on the political Right,
that is, they want us to believe, and many of them say so outright, that the
single problem in our society is the government and the State. Indeed that Capitalism is a
wonderful system, it is what they want it, is what they support, but it has been undone, distorted,
overwhelmed by the government. So that what we need to solve our economic problems, these
Right-wing Anarchists tell us, is less government, less state, get the government off our backs, then
an ungovernmental-troubled Capitalism can, and will, do everything we need, and want it to do.
On the other side, there is a Left-wing Anarchism, a left-wing Anarchism which says,
“No, no, no! The problem of the state is precisely its relationship to, and its dependence on, the
Capitalists in our society, and on the Capitalist system, which so encumbers the government that
instead of being the representative of all of us, to do what we need done collectively for us,
has instead been hijacked, become the instrument of the Capitalists, of the employer minority
that uses the State to control and govern the employee majority in the workplace. The
capitalists do it themselves inside the factory, inside the office, inside the store, but in the
broader society the Capitalists need something that at least looks like it's a representative
of everybody. That's the government, the state, the parliament, whatever it is, but then they use
their power and their money to basically control it. That’s a notion of Anarchists on the left,
who see the government as an instrument of Capitalism’s control over society.
Look, the history of Capitalism has been one in which many people struggle between these two ways
of expressing and understanding their antipathy to the government. One of the
earliest collaborators with Karl Marx was a man named Bakunin from Russia, who was a theorist
of Anarchism. Peter Kropotkin, another famous theorist, was fiercely anti-Capitalist.
Marxists, Socialists, and Anarchists have often collaborated, their emphasis being
a little different. One more on the Capitalist, one more on the government
but, in many cases, they understood they were fighting a united enemy — State and Capitalist,
and their emphases could differ because they were doing the same task.
It's quite different with Right-wing Anarchism. That really is performing a wonderful service for
Capitalism. It's allowing all of the problems Capitalism imposes on people — firing people
out of a job, evicting them out of their homes, abusing them with faulty products — all of that
the Libertarian Right-wing Anarchists attribute to the government, to the bad influence,
to the bad policies, to the bad laws. Every time the Capitalist does something horrible,
they are there to blame the government, to make sure that the victims
don't see who their victimizer is — the Capitalist system — but instead blame the politicians. Bring
in a new crew, only to discover that the new crew is as dependent on Capitalism as the old crew was.
So the struggle between Anarchism of all its kinds, and Marxism, is really a struggle
to fashion the alliance that has been there, and could be there again,
and to make clear which of the Anarchists are the opposition, and which are the allies.
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