The State by Anthony de Jasay (42 page)

eventually lead to a passive acceptance of a step-by-step extension of public ownership, if not to a clamour for it.

5.1.16 In a section of his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy devoted to the sociology of the intellectual, Schumpeter makes the point that intellectuals (whom he defines, a shade severely, as people "who talk and write about subjects outside of their professional competence" and "have no direct responsibility for practical affairs"), "cannot help nibbling at the foundations of capitalist society." They help along the ideology that corrodes the capitalist order which is notoriously impotent at controlling its intellectuals. "Only a government of non-bourgeois nature... under modern circumstances only a socialist or fascist one-is strong enough to discipline them." With private ownership of capital and the autonomy of particular interests (which they are busy ideologically to undermine), the intellectuals can to some extent hold out against a hostile state, protected as they are by "the private fortresses of bourgeois business which, or some of which, will shelter the quarry."*52 State capitalism offers greater (and in terms of such intangibles as social status, being listened to at the top and having a captive audience at the bottom of society, incomparably greater) rewards to compliant, non-nibbling intellectuals than does private capitalism. Such rewards may or may not compensate them for the latent risk, in a world of no "private fortresses," of having nowhere to shelter should they find themselves nibbling at the system after all. Why intellectuals, of all groups, strata, castes or whatever, should have a privileged relationship with the socialist state, why they are solicited and rewarded, is a puzzling question;*53 that it is "strong enough to discipline them" seems to me, if anything, a reason for not soliciting and rewarding them. That the socialist state attracts the intellectual is understandable enough, given the role of reason in the formulation and legitimation of activist policy. (I have argued
the natural leftward bias of the brainy in chapter 2, p. 102). What is less obvious is why this love does not remain unrequited, why the socialist state accepts the intellectuals at their own valuation-a strange position to take on the part of a monopsonist, the sole buyer of their services.

1. Even if there were some hard-to-fathom yet rational reason for pampering them, nobody else need be pampered. The above and regrettably inconclusive digression about intellectuals was to provide sharper relief to this thesis. Trotsky's deduction in the Revolution Betrayed, that once the state owns all capital, opposition is death by slow starvation, perhaps overstates the case. It is nonetheless right in sensing the potent constraining force that comes down on bread-winners when the political and the economic, instead of broadly cancelling each other out, are amalgamated and encircle a person. The subsistence wage needed to reproduce labour may or may not have an ascertainable sense. (I would certainly argue that at least in Marx's theory of value, it is a tautology. Whatever wage happens to be paid, no matter how low or high, it is identically equal to the subsistence wage.) But if the subsistence wage did have objective meaning, only state capitalism would have the assured ability to keep everybody's actual wage down to subsistence level.
   
 

2. Recourse by the dissatisfied wage-earner to the political process and appeals to the state for distributive justice are, of course, absurd in a world where the state is both party and judge, i.e. where it has successfully merged economic and political power. The point for the state in achieving such a merger is not primarily that opposition to it becomes slow starvation, though that is a valuable enough result. It is rather that it can obtain non-opposition in return for mere "subsistence," or if that term is too
   

fluid to serve, in return for less than it would have to pay for consent in a competitive political setting.

1. In what is for some reason regarded as a substantial contribution to the modern theory of the state, the American socialist James O'Connor considers that if its surplus were not spent on social investment, or dissipated in the interest of such privately owned "monopolies" as may survive, state-owned industry could lead to the "fiscal liberation" of the state.*54 By implication, if there are no, or only few, "private monopolies" left to dissipate the surplus on, and the state is under no competitive pressure to undertake more "social investment" than it sees fit, it will have achieved its rational purpose, for which "fiscal liberation" is a perhaps narrow but evocative label. Not only is it maximizing its discretionary power by making the most of a given social and economic environment (for instance, the environment defined by democratic politics and a "mixed economy"), but it has improved the environment itself by cleansing civil society of the economic power that was diffused within it. In such an environment, far more discretionary power is potentially available for the state to maximize, so that in creating it and making the most of it, it has, so to speak, maximized the maximum.
   
 

2. Is, however, its success complete? A crucial link seems to be missing for state capitalism to be a workable system. For if the state is the sole employer, it can liberate resources for its own discretionary use by telling people what to do, without overpaying them for their obedience. But what is to prevent a rival from spoiling all and bidding for political power by promising higher wages-as he would bid for political power under private capitalism by promising more distributive justice? What is to stop politics from undoing economics? Can we, to be more specific,
   

take it for granted that once economic power is fully concentrated in the state, democratic political forms ipso facto lose their content and, even if piously preserved, become empty rites?

1. For all his pragmatism, J. S. Mill was, for one, quite categoric on this point: "if the employees of all these different enterprises were appointed and paid by the government, and looked to the government for every rise in life; not all the freedom of the Press and the popular constitution of the legislature would make this or any other country free otherwise than in name."*55 What he describes is, substantially, the socialist position (though presented with the seamy side up). For fully fledged socialists the idea of the owner of capital voluntarily surrendering his dominance by bowing to the caprice of the ballot box is, at best, comic. For them, the replacement of bourgeois by socialist democracy entails safeguards of one sort or another against the ballot box producing retrograde results. Electoral outcomes must respect the realities of the new "relations of production" and the question of the state losing tenure to some demagogic rival must not arise.
   
 

2. All states, however, do not first acquire a socialist consciousness and then set about nationalizing capital. Doing things in that order is a distinctly third-worldly scenario. Elsewhere, it is not necessarily the most feasible. The state of an advanced society may both want and have to embark on its self-emancipating, "maximizing" course while still committed to the "bourgeois" democratic rules. Though their competitive aspect may have reduced it to drudgery, it will submit to these rules both because it has, at least as yet, no power to do otherwise, and because it has at the outset no convincing reason for taking the risk of bending them. It can advance-or should we say sleep-walk?-some way towards the goal of "maximax," and perhaps pass the point of no
   

return, without first transforming "bourgeois" into "people's" democracy. Electoral politics is in fact a natural promoter of state ownership, once the "mixed economy" has lost enough of its capacity (and willingness) to adapt to change for nationalization to become the obvious saviour of industries and jobs in jeopardy. The state can with advantage let itself be carried some way down this social democratic road, where the continuing operation of the competitive politics of consent serves as a spur to the growing concentration of economic power in its own hands.

1. Popular sovereignty and competitive politics with free entry, however, are ultimately inconsistent with the raison d'être of state capitalism and would in fact break it up as a working system. Under democracy, people are encouraged to try and get, by the political process, what the economic one denies them. The whole thrust of chapter 4 was to isolate and present the awkward consequences, for state and civil society, of this contradiction. Though awkward and in their cumulative effect malignant, however, they are not lethal for a system where political and economic power and responsibility are reasonably separate. On the other hand, when these are united, the contradiction becomes much too powerful. Multi-party competition for tenure of the role of sole owner of the economy and employer of the entire electorate, would be combining mutually destructive features in one system. It would be tantamount to asking the wage-earners to fix, by voting, their own wages and workloads. An effort of imagination is needed to visualize the result.*56 Social democrat or democrat socialist, the state cannot for long live with rules which inexorably produce a self-devouring social system.
   
 

2. Owner and employer, it now has sufficient power to start bending the democratic rules to escape demagogic and incompatible
   

outcomes, adapting the old political process to the functional requirements of the new social system with its new "relations of production." Possible solutions available to it are of two basic types. One is to retain bourgeois democracy with multi-party competition, but progressively to restrict the scope of popular sovereignty, so that the winning party is not awarded tenure of all state power, but only power over areas where decisions cannot produce incompatibilities with the planned functioning of the economy. (Whether such areas can be found at all depends, of course, in part on how hard you look for them.) The hiring and firing of people, command over the army and the police and matters of income and expenditure, must be reserved to a permanent executive not subject to election and recall, for (as responsible citizens can readily see) otherwise demagogic overbidding would rapidly lead to breakdown. The non-elected permanent executive would in time find that to ensure consistency of the sources and uses of all resources, it is obliged to assert its leading role over all areas of social life including the educational and the cultural, although it may (at some risk to public calm) admit the consultative role, in non-critical matters, of some elected multi-party assembly.

5.1.25 The other type of solution is to restrain and reform political competition itself, notably by regulating entry, to the effect that while an elected assembly continues technically to dispose of state power as a whole, it becomes difficult and eventually impossible to elect people who would dispose of it inappropriately. For instance, the state executive in place could screen prospective candidates adhering to several parties from such a point of view. Since all are state employees (as are their parents and children, spouses, relatives and friends), it could discourage the candidature of those who might not respect its necessary leading role. Such screening would permit the free democratic election of
responsible, non-demagogic representatives. Caring as much for the well-being of their families as for that of the country, they could be relied upon to support (in informal consensus, formal coalition or "national front" and purged of petty party rivalry) the responsible, non-demagogic government of the state-affording it the security and continuity of tenure which it needs for the steady, unhurried realization of its ends.

1. There may well be other, more insidious and unobtrusive ways for competitive democratic rules to bend, lose their content and become empty rites so that competition for state power ceases to be a genuine threat to the incumbent. In no way a "historical necessity," nor something which happens of itself "untouched by human hand," this result is yet the logical corollary of preponderant state ownership and a necessary condition for the functioning of the social system of which such ownership is a part.
   
 

2. Recall, then, is abolished in practice. One way or another, people are stopped from using the political process for dismissing their own employer. Failing such prevention, the employer-employee relation would assume farcical shapes: would-be employers would have to ask the employees to employ them, work would become round-the-clock consultation and pay would be self-assessed (to each according to what he says he deserves).
   
 

3. With the abolition of recall, revolution moves up on the scale of political alternatives. From last resort, it is transformed into the first and in fact the sole recourse of the disappointed political hedonist, the non-conformist, the man hating to be lied to, as well as the man hating his job. For the really deep, all-pervading
   

change brought about by the Gleichschaltung of economic with political power is that as dispersed, autonomous structures of power are flattened, all strain becomes a strain between state and subject.

1. Little or nothing can henceforth be settled in bilateral negotiations between subjects, owners and non-owners, employers and employees, buyers and sellers, landlords and tenants, publishers and writers, bankers and debtors. Except clandestinely and criminally, there is little give and take where, at least by rights, only the state can give. Bargaining and contract are largely displaced by command-obedience relations. Independent hierarchies disappear. Groups between man and state become, at best, "transmission belts" and at worst false fronts with emptiness behind.
   
 

2. This may well be a great facility for the state. However, it is also a source of danger. Everything now is the state's fault; all decisions that hurt are its decisions; and tempted as it may be to blame "bureaucracy" and "loss of contact with the masses" for smelly drains, boring television programmes, uncaring doctors, overbearing supervisors, shoddy goods and apathetic shop-girls, it is in a cleft stick. As a state it must not admit to being at fault, yet it can disavow its servants and proxyholders only so often.
   
 

3. Thus, totalitarianism is not a matter of fanatical minds and bullying wills "at the top," nor of the terrifying naivety of their ideologists. It is a matter of self-defence for any state which has played for high stakes and won, exchanging one predicament for another. Having gathered all power to itself, it has become the