Dominic Frisby: Life After the State. Unbound. £9.99.
The best part of this book is the title, and even that is not totally accurate. Frisby in fact advocates capitalism with a much smaller state apparatus than now, combined with a so-called free market, and where the only tax is on land values. In the last few pages he does say he leans towards ‘anarcho-capitalism’ (capitalism with no state at all, supposedly), but he says nothing about how this would work and it is not his main focus, so we will ignore it here.
Frisby’s strategy is to blame nearly all the problems of society on the state. He defines capitalism as a system where prices and a business’s success or failure are determined by the market. What exists now is not real capitalism but something called crony capitalism, where success is determined by the privileges a business is granted by the state, in the form of subsidies, regulation, etc. Mysteriously, this is claimed to have existed only since the days of Thatcher and Reagan. Under crony capitalism, a person who benefits from the privileges granted by governments is a rent-seeker, defined as ‘Somebody who does not himself create new wealth, but appropriates that wealth from other people after it has already been created’. This is not a bad definition of a capitalist, but alas Frisby has no idea that the capitalist class do not themselves produce but exploit the rest of us.
He wants the state to do no more than defend property rights, which means there would still be police and armies. This is what the state exists for now: it is ‘a coercive machine (police, judiciary, armed forces, schools, etc.) for conserving the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers in a geographical area’ (www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/education/z-marxism).
The book has many shortcomings, one of which is that often only part of an argument is made. For instance, Frisby does not even try to argue that capitalism was wonderful before its crony variety developed. Further, he begins by discussing Glasgow, once a major port and centre of entrepreneurial activity (in the 18th century it controlled the tobacco trade with the US), and contrasts this with its current situation: high unemployment, low life expectancy, high murder rate. As with many things, this decline is supposed to have started with the First World War, when the state began to intervene much more in daily life. But he makes no attempt to describe the lives of Glaswegian workers in the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the appalling living and health conditions (life expectancy of 42 years for men and 45 for women in the 1820s, for instance). Of course, acknowledging this would have completely undermined the point he wishes to make.
Frisby claims that capitalism ‘exalts peaceful co-operation between producers and suppliers, without coercion, theft, and rent-seeking’. What is missing from this idyllic picture is the employer, and there can be no co-operation between the capitalist and the workers who are forced to sell their labour power. He sees socialism as involving a big state and high levels of taxation, yet mystifyingly he refers a couple of times to his own system as ‘socialism without the state’.
The book’s general level of reliability is illustrated by its author not even being able to cite the principle ‘From each according to ability, to each according to need’ correctly, mangling it as ‘From each according to their means, to those according to their needs’.
Paul Bennett
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