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�Donkeys don�t have to be hit every time. Like the dogs that Pavlov taught to drool at the sound of a bell, just seeing the stick can be enough. Again there are different sticks for different groups. One simple stick is that the carrot might be taken away.�

Fear is one of the major sticks that the state/capital has at its disposal. Much of the new technology of the stick is designed to intimidate. For example, the body armour used by the Merseyside Constabulary�s riot police bears more than a superficial resemblance to the storm troopers in Star Wars. This is not a coincidence. More practically, the mounted police used in �crowd control� are not especially effective in a riot situation. A charge by mounted police can (with the right knowledge) be easily halted, however they rely upon the fear they cause expecting the crowd to flee in terror.

Removal of the carrot (or simply the threat of its removal) is also highly effective as a stick. Historically, this has taken the form of starvation, crop requisition, land seizures, enclosures etc.

� The old enclosures were a counter-revolutionary process whereby, after a century of high wages and a breakdown of feudal authority, beginning in the late 1400s, farmers in England were expropriated from their land and commons by state officials and landlords�

�the enclosures, however, are not a one time process exhausted at the dawn of capitalism. They are a regular return on the path of accumulation and a structural component of class struggle.�

The development of capitalism allowed those in power an unprecedented array of carrots to dangle in front of the newly created urban proletariat. Indeed an incentive was no doubt necessary to entice the peasantry from their land, community and traditions into the dirty, stinking, overcrowded cities and towns. Brute force was not always effective in achieving this aim as the Luddite risings proved.

As the nature of capitalism changed and the workers� links with the land were broken, the fear of unemployment became a major stick. During the Russian revolution the relative immaturity of industrial capitalism in Russia allowed large numbers of the newly created proletariat to flee to the countryside and reintegrate themselves into the rural peasant economy. Thus negating the stick factor of unemployment and urban food shortages.

Unemployment, and the fear of unemployment, remain major sticks. During the 1980s Thatcher used mass unemployment as a strategic weapon with devastating effect to shatter militant working class communities such as the miners.

Even now unemployment and the benefit system (originally a carrot to stave off the treat of revolution) are major weapons in the arsenal of those in power. The introduction of the �Job Seekers Allowance� is recent example of this.