association is needed to bring the offending individual to book, and make them
change their ways. The principle of the minimal state is also necessary to tackle
positive externalities as in a situation in which some, but not all, households in a
neighbourhood pay for the protection of a policing agency. However, the presence
of a policing agency may have a deterrent effect from which allhouseholds benefit,
and premium payers, indignant at the fact that they are paying for services from
which ‘free-riders’ benefit, withdraw from the scheme which then collapses.
How does Nozick justify the services of a minimal state that apply to all? Who
funds such a service? Nozick argues that a minimal state emerges in a way that
violates no one’s rights in the process, but how is the dominant protection agency
which becomes the minimal state to exist without violating the rights of its
competitors? Nozick’s argument is that these competitive agencies are compensated
because the minimal state provides protective services free of charge. But what
happens if the agencies do not accept the monopolistic role of the minimal state?
People are being compensated whether they like it or not, so that it is difficult to
see how the minimal state avoids compulsion.
Moreover, once this compulsion has been justified, this is a principle capable of
infinite extension. After all, if the provision of protection is deemed too ‘risky’ for
competing agencies, why could not one argue, say, that the provision of low-cost
housing or accessible medical services are too ‘risky’ to be left to private agencies?
The New Liberals of the late nineteenth century showed just how painlessly the
notion of ‘protection’ can be broadened. Will people feel secure if they are destitute
and have no job? Are contracts really respected if the rich invade the security of
the poor? Once you have the state, a consistent free-market anarchist could argue,
how do you stop it from expanding? (For more on Nozick see Chapter 4.)
Pressures to conform can only really be successful when everyone is, broadly
speaking, in the same boat and can change places. There has to be a sense of common
interest – freedom and equality– and if we begin with an order in which possessive
individualism has divided society, how do we move to a condition of equality
without regulation and compulsion, and even – horror of horrors – a role for
government? Indeed, Marshall argues that ‘anarcho-capitalists’ should not be called
anarchists at all (1993: 565).Anti-capitalist anarchists: Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin
Proudhon (1809–65) was certainly a socialist, although he objected to communism
on the grounds that it subordinates the individual to the collectivity (Marshall, 1993:
238). It is the unequal distribution of property that creates disorder, but the answer,
as he saw it, was ‘mutualism’ – a system that avoided the vices of both private
property and collective ownership, and was based upon exchange and credit.
Exchange would occur through associations that calculated the necessary labour
time involved in a product. People could start businesses by borrowing from a
mutual credit bank, and this economic reorganisation would make the state
redundant. In Proudhon’s view, parliamentary democracy is futile and
counterproductive – ‘Universal suffrage is counter revolution’ is one of his many
celebrated dictums (Marshall, 1993: 244).Chapter 11 Anarchism 243