The State by Anthony de Jasay (41 page)

regarded as a criterion of another, higher order of rationality. Making itself less dependent on its subjects' consent, and making it harder for rivals to compete, would amount to improving the environment instead of adjusting to it.

1. It is not, of course, actually irrational for the state not to do this. I am not arguing some historical necessity, some inexorable dynamics which must cause any state, if sound of mind, to become totalitarian. On the other hand, I would not accept that, like Plato's Republic on its way from democracy to despotism, the state "degenerates" in the process. If it has improved its ability to fulfil its ends, it has not degenerated, though it may well have become less apt to serve the ends of the observer, who would then have every reason to be alarmed by the change. I am arguing, though, that it is rational in a higher, "strategic" sense of rationality different from the "tactical" sense of optimal adjustment, for the state generally to become more rather than less totalitarian to the extent that it can get away with it, i.e. maintain majority support at the stage where it still needs it. It is also rational for a rival for power to propose, under democracy, a more totalitarian alternative if this is more attractive to the majority though more unattractive to the minority.*40 Hence, there is in competitive, democratic politics, always a latent propensity for totalitarian transformation. It manifests itself in the frequent appearance of socialist policies within non-socialist government and opposition programmes, and in socialist streaks in the liberal ideology.
   
 

2. Whether or to what extent this potential is realized is a matter almost of hazard, of the fundamentally unpredictable historical setting. By neat contrast, no potential the other way round, for the democratic transformation of a totalitarian state, can be logically
   

derived from any maximization assumption that would admit of the state having the kind of ends, whatever they are specifically, whose attainment calls for the discretionary use of power.

4.6.1
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Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State

Anthony de Jasay

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5.
State CapitalismWhat Is to Be Done?

State capitalism is the fusion of political and economic power. It ends the anomaly of armed force being centred in the state, while the ownership of capital is dispersed throughout civil society.

1. People will finally be stopped from claiming through politics what is denied them by economics.
   
2. When he laid down the agenda for the out-of-power elite in "What Is to Be Done?," Lenin wanted his party to conquer by professionalism, secrecy, centralization, specialization and exclusivity. Harsh and chilling, his programme was not the sort the seeker after power can openly lay out before a public he needs to seduce. Laying it out would have spoilt his chances, had they ever depended on broad public support or any manner of capturing supreme power, other than by the previous tenant's default, that is to say by the collapse, in the chaos of a lost war and the February 1917 revolution, of the defences of the regime he sought to replace. He was for taking society unawares, securing the essential instruments of repression and using them without much regard for popular consent. As he put it almost on the eve of the Bolshevik assumption of power in October 1917, "people as they are now" rather than as they are supposed to become in "anarchist utopias," "cannot dispense with subordination," which "must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and working people, i.e. to the proletariat,"*41 undiluted by petty-bourgeois cant about "the peaceful submission of the minority to the majority."*42 He thought it "splendid" of Engels to declare that "the proletariat needs the state, not in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries."*43 Once in power, he scolded that "our government is excessively mild, very often it resembles jelly more than iron";*44 he called for the fiction of an impartial judiciary to be forgotten, stating ominously that as organs of proletarian power, "the courts are an instrument for inculcating discipline,"*45 and explaining that there is "absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals."*46 (This truth must be treated as a powerful one, derived as it is from the "material base" of society, for "unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of
   

large-scale machine industry."*47 In effect, in its first six months, Lenin's government largely liquidated the Menshevik or just plain grass-roots nonsense about the decentralized authority of factory soviets, share and share alike, worker self-management and the proliferation of pretexts for endless discussions and "meetingism" at all levels in the name of direct democracy.)

1. This was all quite strong stuff, unpalatable and unashamed, fit for the victors' ears and not designed to reconcile the victims. The agenda for an incumbent state depending on the consent of more than a minute "vanguard," seems to me diametrically different. Excepting the case of taking over a state laid flat by defeat in a major war, a cynical minority is as likely as not to spoil its own chances by its very cleverness, so uncongenial to the rest of society. Instead of professionalism, the incumbent state at the start of the road to discretionary power needs amateurism; instead of secrecy and exclusivity, openness and broad co-option.*48
   
 

2. A consent-dependent incumbent state must not talk or act too knowingly and professionally about power, how to get and how to use it. It must not for a moment appear, nor even see itself, as (an albeit benign) conspiracy, about to take in society while pretending to stay subjected to its mandate. It must, indeed, sincerely feel that it is obeying the popular mandate in its own way (the only way in which it can be "really," "wholly" obeyed). If the effect of its policies is to entrap its subjects and to deprive them of the independence of livelihood they need for withholding their consent, this must take place as a slowly emerging by-product of constructive state actions, each of which they find easy to approve. Entrapment, subjugation should no more be the consciously set aims of the state than monopoly profit the aim of the innovating entrepreneur.
   
3. The state's tenure is precarious to the extent that its power remains one-dimensional, merely political power. This is largely the case in historical settings where economic power is dispersed throughout civil society, conforming to the inherently dispersed nature of the institution of private property. Such settings may look natural to us, but they are by no means the historical norm. From an analytical point of view, too, they are a freak, an anomaly.
   
 

4. In the face of the state's monopoly of organized armed force, it is an illogical oddity to find economic power lodged, as it were, in other places. Is it not an oversight, a strange lack of appetite on somebody's part for the duality of these two sources of power to persist for any length of time? For the emphasis, by modern historians of various persuasions, on the possible causal relations running both ways between capital ownership and state power, merely deepens the mystery of why money has not yet bought the gun or the gun has not yet confiscated the money.
   
 

5. One type of political theory, not without twisting and turning, defines away this anomaly by flatly denying the separateness and autonomy of political power (except for "relative autonomy," which is too conveniently elastic a concept to merit serious attention). Political and economic power both cohabit in the metaphysical category "capital" and jointly serve the "objective" need of its "expanded reproduction." However, if we deny ourselves the facility of such a handy solution, we are left with what looks like a remarkably unstable system.
   
 

A tilt of the system toward anarchy or at least a measure of ascendancy of civil society vis-à-vis the state, would correspond to the dispersal of hitherto centralized political power. Once it got going, such dispersal could easily gain momentum. In a full-blown process to disperse political power, private armies, by keeping the tax collector away from their territory, would bankrupt the state, contributing to the atrophy of the state army and presumably to the further spread of private armies.*49 There is not the least trace at present of a tendency for social change to take any such turn. The eventuality of a dispersal of political power to match dispersed economic power looks a purely symbolic "empty box."

1. A tilt the other way, towards state capitalism with the ascendancy of the state over civil society, corresponds to the centralization of hitherto diffuse economic power and its unification, in one locus of decision, with political power. The summary answer to the incumbent's rhetorical "what is to be done?" is "fuse political and economic power into a single state power" and "integrate citizenship and livelihood" so that the subject's whole existence shall be ruled by one and the same command-obedience relation, with no separate public and private spheres, no divided loyalties, no countervailing centres of power, no sanctuaries and nowhere to go.
   
 

2. In the consciousness of state and public alike, this apocalyptic agenda must take on a prosaic, quiet, down-to-earth and anodyne aspect. It should, and quite easily does, translate itself into some formula which the ruling ideology has rendered largely inoffensive, such as "the strengthening of democratic control over the economy" so that "it should function in harmony with society's priorities."
   

1. When I say that contrary to the ruthless cleverness stipulated by Lenin, the state can best maximize its power over civil society by being at the outset somewhat amateurish and candid, the benefit of transparent confidence in the painless and benign character of economic and social engineering is foremost in my mind. It is positively good for the state to believe that the measures found necessary to establish "democratic control" over the economy will in due course have, as their principal effect, an enhanced say by the people in the proper use of the country's productive apparatus (or consequences of a similar description). It is good for it sincerely to consider voices which assert the exact opposite as obscurantist or in bad faith.
   
 

2. It is conducive to the state's ultimate purposes to substitute conscious direction of the social system for automatism, for every such "voluntarist" step is likely, by cumulative systemic changes, to induce a need for more guidance in some of the most unexpected places. The less efficient (at least in the sense of "the less self-sustaining," "the less spontaneous" and "the less self-regulating") the workings of the economic and social system become, the more direct control the state will have over people's livelihoods. It is one of the numerous paradoxes of rational action that a degree of well-intentioned bungling in economic and social management and the usual failure to foresee the effects of its own policies, are peculiarly appropriate means to the state's ends. It is government incompetence which, by creating a need for putting right its consequences, steadily enlarges the scope for the state to concentrate economic power in its own hands and best contributes to the merging of economic with political power. It is very doubtful whether government competence could ever get the process going from a democratic starting position.
   
3. Stressing the paradox, we might go a little further and argue that the spirit which best helps the state emancipate itself from its ungrateful role of democratic drudge is one of confident innocence and uncomprehending sincerity. In my choice of adjectives, I am inspired by the example of a tract by a socialist theorist on the programme of the united French Left prior to its 1981 electoral victory. In this work, it is explained in manifest good faith that nationalization of large-scale industry and banking would reduce statism and bureaucracy, provide an additional safeguard for pluralistic democracy and create a really free market.*50
   
 

4. Schematically, the state would find itself advancing, by small and steady degrees, towards discretionary power by first merely following the standard liberal prescription. It should at the outset "rely on prices and markets" for the allocation of resources "and then" proceed to redistribute the resulting social product "as justice required."*51 The inconsistency between an allocation and a distribution arrived at in this way, should alone suffice to bring about partial imbalances, false signals and symptoms of waste. In the face of the emerging evidence that "markets do not work," industries fail to adapt to changes in time, unemployment persists and prices misbehave, support should build up for the state to launch more ambitious policies. Their intended effect would be the correction of malfunctions induced by the initial policy. One of their unintended effects may be to make the malfunctions worse or cause them to crop up somewhere else. Another is almost inevitably to make some existences, jobs, businesses if not whole industries, wholly dependent on "economic policy," while making many others feel some partial dependence.
   
5. This stage-often approvingly called the "mixed economy," suggesting a civilized compromise between the complementary interests of private initiative and social control-has, however, merely pierced, without razing to the ground, the maze of obstacles, ramparts and bunkers where private enterprise can in the last resort, and at a cost, shelter the livelihood of those, owners and non-owners alike, who have occasion to oppose the state. Only the abolition of private capital ownership ensures the disappearance of these shelters. A "mixed economy" needs to go to extreme lengths in terms of state controls in order for private enterprise to cease being a potential base of political obstruction or defiance. Planning, industrial policy and distributive justice are promising yet imperfect substitutes for state ownership; the essential, almost irreplaceable attribute of the latter is not the power it lends to the state, but the power it takes out of civil society, like the stuffing you take out of a rag doll.
   
 

6. The transition to socialism, in the sense of an almost subconscious, sleep-walking sort of "maximax" strategy by the state, both to augment its potential discretionary power and actually to realize the greatest possible part of the potential thus created, is likely to be peaceful, dull and unobtrusive. This is its low-risk high-reward approach. Far from being any noisy "battle of democracy... to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state"; far from involving some heroic revolutionary break with continuity; far from calling for the violent putting down of the propertied minority, the transition to socialism would probably be the more certain the more it relied on the slow atrophy of initially independent, self-regulating subsystems of society. As their free functioning was constrained, the declining vitality of successive chunks of the "mixed economy" would