The State by Anthony de Jasay (43 page)

sole focus of all conflict, and it must construct totalitarian defences to match its total exposure.

1. What is to be done to protect state capitalism from revolution? It may be that the danger is largely academic, an empty box, a mere matter of logical completeness, for revolutions have been made obsolete by technical progress. Quick-firing weapons, armoured vehicles, water-cannon, "truth drugs" and, perhaps above all, central control of telecommunications, may have made the position of the incumbent state much easier to defend than to attack. Not for nothing is the successor state of Kathedersozialismus called that of Panzersozialismus. Lately it is being said that the computer has reversed the technical trend in favour of the incumbent state. Though it is hard for the layman to grasp why this should be so (the contrary looks prima facie more likely), we must leave the question for more qualified minds to resolve. In any event, if modern revolutions are at all conceivable, there is a presumption that for the very reasons that oblige it to be totalitarian, state capitalism runs greater risks and needs stronger defences against revolt than states that do not own, but merely redistribute what others own.*57
   
 

2. Terror and state television sum up the commonplace conception of what is needed for state security. No doubt they both have their roles in obviating recourse to actual repression, rather in the manner of preventive medicine reducing hospital and medical costs. However, the best defences start at a deeper level, in the moulding of character and behaviour, in inculcating the belief that certain basic features of social life, the "leading role," the non-recall and continuity of the state, its monopoly of capital and its primacy over individual right, are immutable. The state's determination to use its subjects should never waver, never wax
   

and wane. Their lot must be preordained, stable; it should not worsen significantly yet should improve only with deliberate slowness; rapid change either way is bad, but of the two, rapid change for the better is more dangerous. As in economics "it is all in Marshall," so in sociology "everything has been said by Tocqueville." Three chapters in his Ancien régime et la révolution tell it all: how rising prosperity and the advance toward equality brought on revolution (Book III, ch. IV); how bringing solace to the people made them rise up (Book III, ch. V); and how the royal government prepared the ground and educated the people for its own overthrow (Book III, ch. VI).

1. Prospects of change for the better make people excitedly unhappy, fearful of missing out, aggressive and impatient.*58 "Safetyvalve" type concessions and reforms, whether great or little, early or late, nearly always turn out to be too little too late, for as a matter of historical experience they raise expectations of change more than in proportion to the actual change. If this possible feature of social psychology has a high probability of being the case in any given conflict of interest between state and society, it must always be wrong for the state to yield. Even if it was a mistake to start off with the reins too short, it is yet better to hold them steady than to loosen them too perceptibly.
   
 

2. Except for the paroxysm of indiscriminate terror in 1937-8 and the few years of haphazard experimentation after 1955, both of which came close to endangering the tenure of the regime and were ended none too soon, Soviet practice since about 1926 seems to me a successful application of these prescriptions. The stability of the modern Soviet state, despite the many good reasons why it should have collapsed on its clay feet before now, is at least consistent with the hypothesis that reform, relaxation, social
   

mobility, dynamic striving for innovation and decentralized initiative, whatever they may do to a society's efficiency and material well-being, are not the ingredients needed to keep it calm, docile, enduring and submissive in the face of totalitarian demands upon it.

5.1.3
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Author: Jasay, Anthony de Title: The State

Anthony de Jasay

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5.
State CapitalismThe State as Class

The right bureaucracy may help make capitalism "responsible" and lend socialism "a human face." Its control, however, is too precarious to shift the constants of either system.

5.2.
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If there must be class conflict in a world of scarcity, who but the universal capitalist can act out the role of dominant class?

1. It is hardly extravagant to claim that a pattern of ownership is well enough described by simply answering the question, "who owns what?" It is by a plain answer to this plain question that we can make the doctrinally least pretentious distinction between private and state capitalism, and most easily understand alternative configurations of power in society.*59 The hopeful assurance that when it is nationalized, capital is "socially owned," for all that it is meaningless, can be a useful euphemism for policy purposes. The more ambitious claim, that there is some ascertainable difference between "state" and "social" or "socialist" ownership, so that the suspected despotic potential of state ownership is not present in social ownership, need not be taken seriously until it is shown how the operation of "society" exercising its property rights, differs from that of the state exercising them.
   
 

2. In the Anti-Duehring, Engels protests that mere state ownership is spurious socialism unless the means of production have "actually outgrown management by joint-stock companies," for otherwise even state-owned brothels could be regarded as "socialistic institutions."*60 Just how large would brothels have to grow, then, to qualify as socialist instead of merely state-owned establishments? Seeking in size the magic quality which transforms state property into socialist property clearly will not do. The scientific socialist notion of the means of production "outgrowing" joint-stock company management has long since succumbed to the test of a century of industrial growth.
   
 

In fairness to Engels, it is his Anti-Duehring again which provides the plainest formulation of a more durable Marxist alternative for identifying kinds of property and social systems. He explains that in a world of scarcity (alias "in the realm of necessity"), the division of society into antagonistic classes must continue. Class conflict, of course, entails the existence of a state to ensure the dominance of one class. Thus the "socialist state" is not a contradiction in terms. The state which owns all the means of production is a repressive socialist state. As there are still classes, it could not yet have withered away, it must continue to repress the exploited on behalf of the exploiter. It can only wither away once abundance has replaced scarcity, i.e. when class conflict has ceased. (If socialism never overcomes scarcity, a contingency Engels does not explicitly treat, the state will never wither away and it will, in perpetuity, own the means of production. As long, therefore, as the state does not succeed too well in "setting free the forces of production" and hence does not inadvertently bring on a world of abundance, it is safe.)

1. Pending abundance and the withering away of the state, "socialism in a world of scarcity" and "state capitalism" are, for practical purposes, synonymous. The division of labour is still a necessity; production is for exchange rather than for need; there are two functionally distinct classes, with the oppressor class appropriating the surplus value produced by the oppressed class. Unlike in private capitalism, the surplus is appropriated, albeit in spite of the oppressed class but in its long-term interest (or in that of the whole society). Who, however, is the oppressor class?
   
 

2. Putting it in less moth-eaten language, the drama is ready to be played but an actor and a role do not match. The state owns, the oppressed do not, but nor do the presumable oppressors. There is
   

no ruling class with a power base cemented in ownership. In its place, usurping its prerogatives, is supposed to stand a peculiar social category, a hermaphrodite body which has a class interest without being a class, which dominates without owning: the bureaucracy.*61

1. Before the bureaucracy can rule, ownership must lose its significance. Hence schemes of social explanation built on the threesome of citizenry, bureaucracy and state always contain some variant of the familiar case about the "growing separation of ownership and control." For this thesis, ownership has come to be reduced to a right to any (private or social) dividends the managing bureaucracy chooses to distribute. Control is, among other things, the discretion to allocate people to capital and vice versa in decisions to invest, hire and fire, and to judge the deserts of those concerned when allocating and distributing.
   
 

2. Each society will have bred its distinctive bureaucracy. England is credited with having an Establishment, France indisputably has her grands corps (just as, the other way round, the grands corps possess their France), Russia used to have the higher grades of the tchin and now it has the nomenklatura, remotely echoed in the USA by the top half-million lawyers and corporate officers. Without any risk of contradiction, all societies can be said to be governed by their "power elites"; much of modern industry is undoubtedly run by professional managers; while the intellectual demi-monde keeps unveiling such ruling entities as "the media," "the bearers of authority" or the "technostructure."*62
   
 

3. Granted the tacit assumption that separation of ownership and control entails loss of control by the owner, rather than the much
   

less drastic delegation of control with possibility of recall (an assumption I shall look at presently), rule by the bureaucracy can be deduced from a stripped-down version of Michels's "iron law." Every organization needs but a few organizers for many organized. It is the former who man the bureau. Once they are in, the bureaucrats rule because those outside are ill placed and insufficiently motivated to dislodge them.

5.2.9
In a very uncharacteristic utopian mood, Lenin assured us that one day administration will be so simple as to be "within everybody's scope," "easily performed by every literate person,"*63 allowing "the complete abolition of bureaucracy,"*64 where " all will govern in turn."*65 (His practice, of course, was to discourage with the utmost firmness any attempt at "governing in turn.") For the time being, however, administration is said to be getting, if anything, more complex. Though many of us are already bureaucrats, the prospect of the rest of us taking turns at it is both impractical and unattractive. This supports the notion that the bureaucracy is a category apart.

5.2.10 The more literally one takes the assumption that ownership does not entail control over property, the larger loom the implications. Ownership of capital becomes irrelevant to power, both in the usual sense of power to make people do things and in the sense of power over the "appropriation of surplus value," including the capitalist's dividend. There is only a grace-and-favour dividend to the putative owners, to "the people" in socialism, to "shareholders" in private capitalism. Why fight about property, then? Nationalization, the wrecking of the "private fortresses of bourgeois business" becomes a pointless and misguided endeavour. A bureaucracy controlling the instrument of the state and safely usurping some of the most important prerogatives of
ownership, could with impunity steer society one way or another, enthrone private property or abolish it, or split the social system down the middle, without its interests being visibly better served by one course than by the other. Whether it took the "capitalist road" or the "socialist" one, or just chased its own tail, would be a toss-up.

1. In reality, however, bureaucracies usually have manifest reasons for coming down on the side of the status quo. They do not normally seek to change it. Indeed, Trotsky's suspicion of Stalin preparing a new Thermidor "to restore capitalism," would look less grotesque if he had found reasonable grounds for supposing that Stalin and the "bureaucracy" he directed would at least not lose the power, control or whatever they possessed and prized, if "capitalism were restored." Yet almost in the same breath in which he uttered his bizarre accusation, Trotsky removed its possible ground by pointing out that the Soviet bureaucracy is "compelled" willy-nilly to protect the system of state ownership as the source of its power, implying logically that a system of private ownership would not have yielded as much power to it even if the new private owners were to have come from its own ranks, with each deserving apparatchik becoming a top-hatted cigar-smoking capitalist.
   
 

2. The most interesting implication of the "ownership is not control" thesis, however, is the support it gives to the belief in our fate being largely a matter of the mores and moods of the officeholders above us. Whether a social system is acceptable or awful, whether people are on the whole contented or miserable under it, depends very much on the variable personal traits of members of the bureaucracy. When the civil service is arrogant or corrupt or both, the managerial elite stony-hearted, the media mercenary and