Anarchism

Pierre Joseph Proudhon said provocative things like "Anarchy is Order" and "Property is Theft". From earlier anarchists he inherited the sense that government was a devise used by the wealthy to preserve their rights of ownership in a post feudal society. In this context government would be a hindrance not an aid in the pursuit of justice. In a sense government, while posing as an arbiter of justice was another class of exploiters. Better to have no government than the corrupt enforcers of the privilege of property. (Anarchism) He perceived that labor and owners would always struggle over how to allocate the benefits of production, and he knew the only way labor could obtain enough of the proceeds to live anything better than a life of meager sustenance was to organize into unions (syndicalism) to confront the owners by withholding their labor. (In Proudhon's time of the mid nineteenth century he observed this to be true for agrarian workers as well as factory workers). Proudhon's student Georges Sorel, coined the phrase "direct action" emphasizing that the confrontation must be between the owner and the workers, not between political representatives (which would have been indirect action.)

The capitalists of today don't want or need the American worker in their factories. They'd prefer to move their plants half way around the world and employ coolie labor. For the relatively few jobs left to be done in America they need to import illegal aliens who are desperate enough to work for less than half of what an American worker would require. The American worker has lost his leverage in this environment, and that wasn't an accident.

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie today, as they did in Proudhon's time, scoff at the idea that committees of workers could handle the complex tasks of government. They insist it's better to entrust those duties to a class of professional politicians. They insist on believing their interests are best served by Bush and Clinton rather than an earnest principled advocate like Dennis Kucinich.

Surely, it seems impossible to even imagine how the workers can reestablish their power to influence their own conditions. But when the thieves and exploiters have twisted and corrupted the economic order until it collapses in a heap, the workers won't have a choice but to make that determination