A Critique of Murray Rothbard’s Anatomy of the State

Andrew M. Wacker

When Murray Rothbard makes the claim, as he does in the opening chapter of Anatomy of the State, that the State is the maintainer of a “monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area,” faithful readers of the Anarchist right marry the definition to the word. This definition would become the basis for the anarcho-capitalist movement of the last half century, a definition repeated as mantra by all those who follow the free market as the guiding light to man’s liberation. But an exercise in semantics is necessary here. Have we defined the “State,” or rather, have we labeled the definition? I think the assumption presented to the reader, at the intent of Rothbard, was to define the word. In doing so, however, the referents are secondary to the word, leaving State vulnerable to all its prior definitions, muddying the message and confusing the application.

It is important, I think, to emphasize that I do not disagree with Rothbard’s criticism of the State. In fact, I have a hard time finding disagreements with any of his arguments against the existence of the State as a dominating, hierarchical structure. A healthy and hungry opposition to unjustified authority is the foundation of the anarchist movement. As an introduction to the hegemony of an elite minority in centralized governments, Rothbard bodes quite well. However, his suggestions relating to the voluntary and cooperative mechanisms of a free society, explicit and otherwise, are antithetical to the latter rhetoric once examined through the lens of his ideas, rather than the label he’s attached to them. An examination of the issue of the State, as I will argue, will make it clear that the enemy of man that Rothbard identifies is tyranny, to which the State is not solely the perpetrator.

It is ironic then that Rothbard first defines the State as he sees it in the chapter titled “What the State is Not.” he writes:

Briefly, the State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment of services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion…1

Rothbard has made his point, quite clearly, that the State is the “only organization in society” that obtains it’s revenue “by coercion,” but is it? The State may be coercive and compulsory, but it is not alone in its tactics. The State is, in fact, in collusion with coercive forces throughout its borders and beyond. Rothbard makes mention of John Locke briefly in the opening paragraph of the second chapter titled “What the State Is”, skimming over his labor theory, without mention of the varying disagreements between the classical liberals about it.2 Where Locke believed that the exclusive ownership of resources by the laborer was necessary, the mix of labor was not necessary to ownership, others like Jean-Jacques Rousseau were not so convinced. Rousseau argued that natural right did not apply to resources that one did not produce.3 Capitalism and the free market advocated by the libertarian right, following Rothbard’s ideas, are Lockean in nature. The malaise expressed for the State suffers from a narrow view, for it does not recognize the coercive, tyrannical nature of men who wield their ownership of private property against their fellow man.

The first men to put their flags in the ground and claim bits of the earth as their own saw to it that tyranny would become the enemy of man. The new land owner who lays claim to ownership of the earth, the water and to all the natural resources in his given territorial area, in many cases, surely has more than he needs. He may, in fact, claim a monopoly on the water. And so what is one to do, born into this land but with no claim to the water? Why, he must enter into a “voluntary agreement” to sell his labor to the commodity owner, or he will die of dehydration. Man, seeing that his private property claims required the coercion of men to keep their claims legitimate, necessarily gave birth to the State as the societal organ to maintain his monopolies.

This notion of property is often referred to as “the right of first use.” This idea that, in it’s natural state, all the earth and her resources are available for the all of mankind is something readily agreed upon by Locke, classical liberals, and those who follow the tradition. The earth before the claim of property as private is the property of all, and so it belongs to all men equally and all have equal right over it. Until, of course, it has been claimed as property. Now the property of mankind is lost to the property of man, enabling the perpetuation of the hierarchical organization of employers and employees in which he who does not own land owns nothing but his labor potential. In the times of classic liberalism, man had not yet owned all the earth’s land, but that would soon change. The assumption of a “boundless frontier” is the achilles heal of Locke’s private property, and it’s only defense against allegations of coercion.

Not only is private property coercive, it is also parasitic, again by Rothbard’s own definition. Rothbard relies heavily on Franz Oppenheimer in his second chapter “What the State Is”. Oppenheimer’s two mutually exclusive ways of acquiring wealth are understood to be the the “economic means” and the “political means”. The economic means, Rothbard suggests, is the free market, the open exchange of resources mixed with labor among the people. As for the political means, Rothbard calls upon the following words to formulate his definition:

The other way is simpler in that it does not require productivity; it is the way of seizure of another’s goods or services by the use of force and violence. This is the method of one-sided confiscation, of theft of the property of others… It should be clear that the peaceful use of reason and energy in production is the “natural” path for man: the means for his survival and prosperity on this earth. It should be equally clear that the coercive, exploitative means is contrary to natural law; it is parasitic, for instead of adding to production, it subtracts from it. The “political means” siphons production off to a parasitic and destructive individual or group; [italics mine] and this siphoning not only subtracts from the number producing, but also lowers the producer’s incentive to produce beyond his own subsistence.4

Has Rothbard forgotten the concepts of capital and profit? The very aim of profit from private property suggests just such a siphoning from the production of man in a parasitic fashion. A man or group of men, claiming right of first use, have now their private property. The owner’s work is done, for it seems his work was to lay claim to the commodities. The production is now to be done by men who own no property, whose only wealth is the exchange rates determined by the land owners for their labor, whilst the landowner oversees this labor, subtracting from their product to claim his profit, a most parasitic of practices. Today’s methods are more parasitic than ever. All that is needed to claim property is money, not of silver or gold, but of arbitrary exchange value. With their currency a person can purchase a factory in a country they have never set foot in, maintaining absolute power over the working conditions, wages, and ultimately the quality of life of people whose families may have occupied this very land for millennia.

Rothbard’s assertions about the State don’t lack validity, but rather scope. In Anarcho-Syndicalism, Rudolf Rocker gives a similar picture of the parasitic nature of the State, mentioning also the arm of humanity it serves

…the modern state was evolved after monopoly economy, and the class divisions associated with it, had begun to make themselves more and more conspicuous in the framework of the old social order. The newly arisen possessing classes had need of a political instrument of power to maintain their economic and social privileges over the masses of their own people, and to impose them from without on other groups of human beings. Thus arose the appropriate conditions for the evolution of the modern state, as the organ of political power of privileged castes and classes for the forcible subjugation and oppression of the non-possessing class.5

While in message the contrasts are stark between Rothbard and Rocker, in substance they differ by little. Both speak of the State as an oppressive force using political means to siphon production away from the producer. Capitalism, in Rothbard’s view, is a tool that can be utilized to free man from the oppression of the State. Rocker, however, does not believe it practical for any of the States methods to be used as an instrument for the liberation of man

Whether the state be monarchy or republic, whether historically it is anchored in an autocracy or in a national constitution, its function remains always the same. And just as the functions of the bodily organs of plants and animals cannot be arbitrarily altered, so that, for example, one cannot at will hear with his eyes and see with his ears, so also one cannot at pleasure transform an organ of social oppression into an instrument for the liberation of the oppressed.6

Capitalism, long time friend and ally of the State, cannot be used at will to the State’s demise. As long as we are using the tools of the State we are destined to be trapped in its clutches. The tools of oppression cannot be the tools of liberation.

Rothbard goes on to make a stunning assertion about the right of those oppressed that is not unfamiliar to anarchists, stating that “the parasitism is ephemeral, and the coercive, parasitic lifeline may be cut off at any time by the resistance of the victims.”7 It’s difficult to read this without thinking of the anarcho-syndicalist tradition. The belief holds that production is done at the hands of the working class and they alone should maintain control of the means of production. It also advocates the formation of popular assemblies in the workplace and the community, and collectivizing the surplus production. It asserts that one cannot own what one does not occupy. Factories, for example, are not occupied for the subsistence of life, but rather occupied by workers contributing their labor. The factory or office or otherwise place of work is filled with wage earners whose wage is but a cut of the wealth they add with their production. The other portion is never seen by the laborer, but is siphoned off as surplus. The surplus, being profit, is distributed amongst an already wealthy few, who, having illegitimately claimed the right of first use on some commodity, has coercively forced men into contract so that they may be paid a wage to survive. As Rocker writes, “where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism.”8 This despotism is the inspiration in the conscience of the revolutionary proletariat, perhaps not the victims Rothbard had intended, but the same victims nonetheless.

Rothbard discusses further the nature of the predation within the structure of the State’s illegitimate authority in his third chapter, “How the State Preserves Itself”.

Since predation must be supported out of the surplus of production, it is necessarily true that the class constituting the State — the full-time bureaucracy (and nobility) — must be a rather small minority in the land, although it may, of course, purchase allies among important groups in the population.9

Rothbard appears to be presenting a relationship between class and authority, and this falls in line with the anarchist tradition of resistance to the rule of the minority. Again, however, we find Rothbard’s use of semantic labels in full play here. While it may be argued that the existence of the State necessarily enables for the predation of labor by unethical persons, it is not made clear how “legitimate” capital and property ownership, in a strictly free market wage society, would begin to undo this relationship of power and predation. It is generally understood that success in the capitalist system is derived from predation. The only way to achieve an accumulation of wealth in such an arrangement is to subtract from others so that you may have more, and as fewer have more, and more have less, the power of capital is slowly filtered to a smaller and smaller minority. Is this the minority that Rothbard is speaking of, it’s soldiers the petty bourgeoisie?

To this point in Anatomy of the State, Rothbard has yet to assert the superiority of capitalism and its separation from the State. This is, however, the ultimate thesis of the book, a book which inspired the anarcho-capitalist movement​, and the reader need only hang on through the introductory chapters to observe the focus shift to capitalism’s primacy

Since the State necessarily lives by the compulsory confiscation of private capital, and since its expansion necessarily involves ever-greater incursions on private individuals and private enterprise, we must assert that the State is profoundly and inherently anticapitalist. In a sense, our position is the reverse of the Marxist dictum that the State is the “executive committee” of the ruling class in the present day, supposedly the capitalists. Instead, the State — the organization of the political means — constitutes, and is the source of, the “ruling class” (rather, ruling caste), and is in permanent opposition to genuinely private capital.10

This assertion by Rothbard insists we reject the relationship between the capitalist and the State, proceeding now to add a new label to the State: “anticapitalist.” By adding this label we now have a growing definition of what the State is not, or what it is, or what it is and is not. A clever use of language by Rothbard has now presented the reader with capitalism as anti-statist, and statism as anti-capitalist. Further, he has refuted capitalism as the foundation of the ruling class with no evidence, leveraging the general distrust of Marx, who all anarchists should consider an authoritarian first and a socialist second. Rothbard goes on to quote De Jouvenel

Only those who know nothing of any time but their own, who are completely in the dark as to the manner of Power’s behaving through thousands of years, would regard these proceedings [nationalization, the income tax, etc.] as the fruit of a particular set of doctrines. They are in fact the normal manifestations of Power, and differ not at all in their nature from Henry VIII’s confiscation of the monasteries. The same principle is at work; the hunger for authority, the thirst for resources; and in all of these operations the same characteristics are present, including the rapid elevation of the dividers of the spoils. Whether it is Socialist or whether it is not, Power must always be at war with the capitalist authorities and despoil the capitalists of their accumulated wealth; in doing so it obeys the law of its nature.11

De Jouvenel’s assertion is as narrow as Rothbard’s, unable to see the coercive and violent nature of capitalism and the accumulation of wealth as a predacious exercise. For instance, the income tax being comparable to the siphoning off the top of production that the owner of the productive property performs should seem obvious with little effort. How can De Jouvenel write “the hunger for authority, the thirst for resources; and in all of these operations the same characteristics are present, including rapid elevation of the dividers of the spoils” and not see that he is making an argument against his own point, or, at the very least, defining the capitalist as being of the same nature? This is, after all, precisely the aim of capitalist venture and private property.

What Rothbard and De Jouvenel fail to mention is the long-standing partnership between the State and the capitalist. At present, the State is more than willing to subsidize private ventures. The most faithful of capitalists applaud the State’s efforts to lighten their contributions to the society while simultaneously lobbying for the tax burden to rest on the proletariat instead. In fact, the capitalist sees such potential in the partnership with the State that there are at present over 12,000 lobbyists in the capital of the United States, with corporations spending an astounding $2.3 to $9 billion per year for their efforts.12 The practice of capitalist interests represented in the legislative bodies of the State is a tradition as old as capitalism and the industrial revolution. In the early 1800’s, for example, two laws were passed in the parliament of the United Kingdom which would give rise to the labor movement that persists today: The Poor Law of 1834 and the Combination Act. The Combination Act was the State’s answer to the birth of the labor movement at large, at the behest of the employers. The act made illegal the formations of workers to petition for better conditions, effectively removing their power to mold the “voluntary agreement” which they must enter.13 The Poor Law of 1834 sought to remove the burden of the poor from the capitalists and convert them into assets. Those who were poor were forced to live in workhouses where they were given only their subsistence for their work. The houses were of such appalling conditions as to attempt to coerce the poor into working for private property owners or face the terrible conditions of the workhouse.14 The Combination Act was the State’s answer to the birth of the labor movement at large, at the behest of the employers. The act made illegal the formations of workers to petition for better conditions, effectively removing their power to mold the “voluntary agreement” which they must enter.14 Wage slavery was now a State subsidized venture. For many decades, at the birth of modern democracy, if one can call it as much, the owning of land, of certain value, was the primary qualification for men to be voters. The Reform Act of 1832 in the UK sought to appease the petty bourgeoisie by opening the right to vote to owners of lesser value land, and of renters whose rent was above a certain nominal. The result was that the electorate increased from 500,000 to 813,000 of the 14 million citizens.15 The expanded electorate consisted mostly of the wealthy. Even today this war on the voting rights of lower classes is being fought in the form of voter ID laws and gerrymandering.

The State, however powerful it and it’s allies are, is not impervious to destruction. As do all who hold power of any sort, the main function of the powerful is self-preservation. Rothbard writes of the subject in the chapter “What the State Fears”

What the State fears above all, of course, is any fundamental threat to its own power and its own existence. The death of a State can come about in two major ways: (a) through conquest by another State, or (b) through revolutionary overthrow by its own subjects-in short, by war or revolution.16

If this is what the State fears, they are not alone. Time and time again the capitalist must face and find new ways to squash just such threats. In this way, the State and the capitalist have been at war in those times that the State has stepped in to protect workers. Often, however, strikes, unions, and the labor movement at large have been the revolutionary force which the capitalist must fight to maintain it’s power. The subjects have spoken up in revolt, and the bosses fear their insubordination. This fear is precisely what gives labor unions their powers. The only threat a union has is to strike, to revolt, and exposes this fear has worked quite well historically.

On the subject of war, the State, again, is not its only exploiter. Competition is another word for war, and just as with war, the subjects tend to be the victims of it and not the powerful war wagers themselves. We’ll turn to Rothbard’s own words once again to shed some light on this relationship

In war, State power is pushed to its ultimate, and, under the slogan of “defense” and “emergency,” it can impose a tyranny upon the public such as might be openly resisted in time of peace. War thus provides many benefits to the State, and indeed every modern war has brought to the warring peoples a permanent legacy of increased burdens upon society.17

There are two thoughts that come to mind here. First, war has been proven to be good business for the bourgeoisie. The production of materials of war has for centuries lined the pockets of entrepreneurial persons whose ethics and morality stop where the dollars flow in. It has become so much so that, in order to keep the capitalist system afloat, the State has found it beneficial to keep itself in constant war. The State and the capitalist system in this regard are inseparable. Secondly, the tactic is often utilized within the companies themselves. The fear of destruction from competition most often leads to the reduction of human costs: layoffs, decreased wages and benefits, mandatory unpaid overtime and the like. The premise that the capitalists property is threatened by a warring faction is immediately shifted as a burden upon the wage laborer.

There are many of these analogies relating the State to Capitalism, but for brevity, I will not address them all in depth, as that would be quite boring for the reader. I hope that I have presented a case which allows you to read Rothbard’s work and find them for yourself, but I do want to point out some of the most egregious examples to help you along on your quest:

“…the majority must be persuaded by ideology that their government is good, wise and, at least, inevitable, and certainly better than other conceivable alternatives.” 18 This has been the work of economists and capital holders since capitalism’s inception, it’s most obvious recent battle that of the Red Scare in the US post-WW2.

This has been the work of economists and capital holders since capitalism’s inception, it’s most obvious recent battle that of the Red Scare in the US post-WW2. “Especially has the State been successful in recent centuries in instilling fear of other State rulers.” 19 The competition of other capitalist ventures is often a tool used to increase wage workers’ sense of duty for fear that the competition will force them out of a job if they don’t work hard enough.

The competition of other capitalist ventures is often a tool used to increase wage workers’ sense of duty for fear that the competition will force them out of a job if they don’t work hard enough. “The increasing use of scientific jargon has permitted the State’s intellectuals to weave obscurantist apologia for State rule that would have only met with derision by the populace of a simpler age.”20 The rise of trickle down economics, multi-level marketing, and the move from pensions to 401K accounts are some low hanging fruit for this example. Rothbard himself has even asserted that wage earners fighting for higher wages are unjustified in doing so because they are not economists.

Speaking of labels and definitions, since Rothbard’s work has done much to inspire the anarcho-capitalist movement, it is not unwarranted to look to a man commonly referred to as “the father of Anarchism,”21 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for his thoughts on the matter. The fact that he died nearly a century before Rothbard’s work does not recuse him from having an opinion. Proudhon opposed both capitalism as an economic system and Marx’s communism as a political system. Of capitalism, Proudhon writes

“Capital”… in the political field is analogous to “government”… The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them . . . What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the people would be simultaneously to enslave its body, its will and its reason.22

Capitalism has an anarchy problem, and it is systemic hegemony of the wealthy. In this regard, however, the aforementioned anarcho-syndicalists had shortcomings and inconsistencies to answer to as well, namely the worker’s hegemony that it asserts. Murray Bookchin in his essay titled “The Ghost of Anarcho-Syndicalism” lays the blame for an economic divide in the anarchist movement squarely on the radical anarchist left.

To the extent that anarchists tried to mingle their ethical views with Marxian claims to “scientific” precision, they laid the basis for tensions that would later seriously divide the anarchist movement itself and lead more economistically oriented anarchists into compromises that vitiated the ethical thrust of anarchism as a social movement.23

In this same essay, Anarchism, Bookchin says, “is above all anti-hierarchical rather than simply individualistic” and “seeks to remove the domination of human by human, not only the abolition of the State.” Anarchism has struggled to separate the economic from the social within its various movements and factions, and maybe rightly so.

In a global society the methods of cooperation and trade are of unavoidable importance. The impending automation revolution, which is coinciding with levels of access to information simply inconceivable to revolutionaries of the past, we have a great responsibility ahead of us. When machines liberate man from labor, what will value become? What of a world where the exchange of labor is no longer necessary as resources become truly abundant? The anarchist movement going forward should approach all of these issues with the intent to free men from tyranny, whatever its source may be, and to live in harmony with the natural world, the only host for liberation. The semantics of anarcho-this and libertarian-that certainly are important discussions to be had, and when revolution comes, which I believe is inevitable, it will be of dire consequence should the revolutionaries not be standing on some common ground. We cannot afford to become a movement of parties and divisions, lest we become like the State which we loathe, but we cannot afford to sacrifice the liberation of all mankind for the measured benefit of some.

Bibliography