Beyond being a paymaster for new forms of production and social relations and defending the owners' power, the state intervened economically in other ways as well. As we noted in section B.2.5, the state played a key role in transforming the law codes of society in a capitalistic fashion, ignoring custom and common law to do so. Similarly, the use of tariffs and the granting of monopolies to companies played an important role in accumulating capital at the expense of working people, as did the breaking of unions and strikes by force.
However, one of the most blatant of these acts was the enclosure of common land. In Britain, by means of the Enclosure Acts, land that had been freely used by poor peasants for farming their small family plots was claimed by large landlords as private property. As E.P. Thompson notes, "Parliament and law imposed capitalist definitions to exclusive property in land" [Customs in Common, p. 163]. Property rights, which exclusively favoured the rich, replaced the use rights and free agreement that had governed peasant's use of the commons. Unlike use rights, which rest in the individual, property rights require state intervention to create and maintain.
This stealing of the land should not be under estimated. Without land, you cannot live and have to sell your liberty to others. This places those with capital at an advantage, which will tend to increase, rather than decrease, the inequalities in society (and so place the landless workers at an increasing disadvantage over time). This process can be seen from early stages of capitalism. With the enclosure of the land, an agricultural workforce was created which had to travel where the work was. This influx of landless ex-peasants into the towns ensured that the traditional guild system crumbled and was transformed into capitalistic industry with bosses and wage slaves rather than master craftsmen and their journeymen. Hence the enclosure of land played a key role, for "it is clear that economic inequalities are unlikely to create a division of society into an employing master class and a subject wage-earning class, unless access to the mans of production, including land, is by some means or another barred to a substantial section of the community." [Maurice Dobbs, Studies in Capitalist Development, p. 253]
The importance of access to land is summarised by this limerick by the followers of Henry George (a 19th century writer who argued for a "single tax" and the nationalisation of land). The Georgites got their basic argument on the importance of land down these few, excellent lines:
A college economist planned To live without access to land He would have succeeded But found that he needed Food, shelter and somewhere to stand.
Thus the Individualist (and other) anarchists' concern over the "land monopoly" of which the Enclosure Acts were but one part. The land monopoly, to use Tucker's words, "consists in the enforcement by government of land titles which do not rest upon personal occupancy and cultivation." [The Anarchist Reader, p. 150] It is important to remember that wage labour first developed on the land and it was the protection of land titles of landlords and nobility, combined with enclosure, that meant people could not just work their own land.
In other words, the circumstances so created by enclosing the land and enforcing property rights to large estates ensured that capitalists did not have to point a gun at workers head to get them to work long hours in authoritarian, dehumanising conditions. In such circumstances, when the majority are dispossessed and face the threat of starvation, poverty, homelessness and so on, "initiation of force" is not required. But guns were required to enforce the system of private property that created the labour market in the first place, to enforce the enclosure of common land and protect the estates of the nobility and wealthy.
In addition to increasing the availability of land on the market, the enclosures also had the effect of destroying working-class independence. Through these Acts, innumerable peasants were excluded from access to their former means of livelihood, forcing them to migrate to the cities to seek work in the newly emerging factories of the budding capitalist class, who were thus provided with a ready source of cheap labour. The capitalists, of course, did not describe the results this way, but attempted to obfuscate the issue with their usual rhetoric about civilisation and progress. Thus John Bellers, a 17th-century supporter of enclosures, claimed that commons were "a hindrance to Industry, and . . . Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence." The "forests and great Commons make the Poor that are upon them too much like the indians." [quoted by Thompson, Op. Cit., p. 163] Elsewhere Thompson argues that the commons "were now seen as a dangerous centre of indiscipline . . . Ideology was added to self-interest. It became a matter of public-spirited policy for gentlemen to remove cottagers from the commons, reduce his labourers to dependence . . ." [The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 242-3]
The commons gave working-class people a degree of independence which allowed them to be "insolent" to their betters. This had to be stopped, as it undermined to the very roots of authority relationships within society. The commons increased freedom for ordinary people and made them less willing to follow orders and accept wage labour. The reference to "Indians" is important, as the independence and freedom of Native Americans is well documented. The common feature of both cultures was communal ownership of the means of production and free access to it (usufruct). This is discussed further in section I.7 (Won't Libertarian Socialism destroy individuality?)
As the early American economist Edward Wakefield noted in 1833, "where land is cheap and all are free, where every one who so pleases can easily obtain a piece of land for himself, not only is labour dear, as respects the labourer's share of the product, but the difficulty is to obtain combined labour at any price." [England and America, quoted by Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Commonsense for Hard Times, p. 24]
The enclosure of the commons (in whatever form it took — see section F.8.5 for the US equivalent) solved both problems — the high cost of labour, and the freedom and dignity of the worker. The enclosures perfectly illustrate the principle that capitalism requires a state to ensure that the majority of people do not have free access to any means of livelihood and so must sell themselves to capitalists in order to survive. There is no doubt that if the state had "left alone" the European peasantry, allowing them to continue their collective farming practices ("collective farming" because, as Kropotkin shows in Mutual Aid, the peasants not only shared the land but much of the farm labour as well), capitalism could not have taken hold (see Mutual Aid, pp. 184-189, for more on the European enclosures). As Kropotkin notes, "[i]nstances of commoners themselves dividing their lands were rare, everywhere the State coerced them to enforce the division, or simply favoured the private appropriation of their lands" by the nobles and wealthy. [Mutual Aid, p. 188]
Thus Kropotkin's statement that "to speak of the natural death of the village community [or the commons] in virtue of economical law is as grim a joke as to speak of the natural death of soldiers slaughtered on a battlefield." [Op. Cit., p. 189]
Like the more recent case of fascist Chile, "free market" capitalism was imposed on the majority of society by an elite using the authoritarian state. This was recognised by Adam Smith when he opposed state intervention in The Wealth of Nations. In Smith's day, the government was openly and unashamedly an instrument of wealth owners. Less than 10 per cent of British men (and no women) had the right to vote. When Smith opposed state interference, he was opposing the imposition of wealth owners' interests on everybody else (and, of course, how "liberal", nevermind "libertarian", is a political system in which the many follow the rules and laws set-down in the so-called interests of all by the few? As history shows, any minority given, or who take, such power will abuse it in their own interests). Today, the situation is reversed, with neo-liberals and right libertarians opposing state interference in the economy (e.g. regulation of Big Business) so as to prevent the public from having even a minor impact on the power or interests of the elite.
The fact that "free market" capitalism always requires introduction by an authoritarian state should make all honest "Libertarians" ask: How "free" is the "free market"? And why, when it is introduced, do the rich get richer and the poor poorer? This was the case in Chile (see Section C.11). For the poverty associated with the rise of capitalism in England 200 years ago, E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class provides a detailed discussion. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States describes the poverty associated with 19th-century US capitalism.