The State by Anthony de Jasay (52 page)

Note also, as examples of an approach which proceeds, so to speak, from the "producer's" motives rather than those of the "consumer," W. A. Niskanen Jr, Bureaucracy and Representative Government, 1971, where "bureaux" seek to maximize their
budgets, and B. S. Frey and F. Schneider, "A Politico-Economic Model of the United Kingdom," Economic Journal, 88, June 1978, who find that when the government is unpopular, it pursues popular policies and when it is popular, it indulges its own ideology.

1. Formally, discretionary power would have become negative insuch postures, hence (total) power would be inadequate to ensure its own maintenance; the tenancy of the state would change hands.
   
 

1. Such proposals reach beyond the bounds of the simple sort ofelectoral competition set out earlier in this chapter. In addition to promising the majority the minority's money (equalizing incomes), they might, for instance, include the equalizing of schools (Gleichschaltung of education) or the equalizing of "economic power" (nationalization of the "means of production"), or some other property, privilege, immunity of the minority, including its creed (Huguenots, Mormons) or race (Jews).
   
 

2. Chapter 5. State Capitalism
   
 

2. V. I. Lenin, "The State and Revolution," in Selected Works,1968, p. 296.
   
 

3. Ibid., p. 279.
   
 

4. Ibid., pp. 306, 325. The quotation is from Engels's 1875"Letter to August Bebel."
   
 

5. V. I. Lenin, "The Immediate Tasks of the SovietGovernment," in Selected Works, p. 419.
   
 

6. Ibid.
   
7. Ibid., p. 421, italics in text.
   
 

8. Ibid.
   
 

9. Even Lenin's own creature has come a long way towardsaffecting this sort of consciousness: in the 1977 Soviet Constitution, it calls itself "the state of the entire people," serenely unworried by the absurdity, at least for Marxists, of a state being everybody's state!
   
 

10. Weak medieval kings and strong territorial lords bothexercised near-sovereign political power only over the land they "owned" (though this was but a quasi-ownership), the patterns of dispersed political and dispersed economic power coinciding as they have never done since. On the other hand, centralized political and economic power have often coincided. They still tend to go hand in hand in "second" and "third world" countries.
    
 

11. Jean Elleinstein, Lettre ouverte aux Français de la Républiquedu Programme Commun, 1977, pp. 140-51. Like the gentleman in the Park who mistook the strolling Duke of Wellington for a certain Mr Smith ("Mr Smith, I believe?"-"If you believe that, Sir, you will believe anything"), Elleinstein manifestly believed that nationalization would do these things rather than their opposites. It is this trusting simplicity that best suits the state (and of course its leaders) in the difficult transition from democracy to socialism.
    
 

12. To readers of J. Rawls's Theory of Justice, 1972, and ofchapter 3 of this book, these phrases will have a familiar ring.
    
 

13. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 5th edn,1977, pp. 146-51.
    
14. If only it bore more lightly the burden of the influence ofGyörgy Lukács, whose hermetic and foggy style its authors tend to follow, The Road of the Intellectuals to Class Power, 1979, by the Hungarian sociologists G. Konrád and I. Szelényi, would be a very worthwhile contribution to an eventual answer to this question. Their original ideas can only be approximately discerned through the swirling Lukácsist obscurity.
    
 

15. James O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State, 1973, ch. 7.
    
 

16. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (ed. by A. D. Lindsay), 1910, p. 165. Itis edifying to reflect that it was none other than the Levellers who, in their democratic fervour, proposed to withhold the franchise from servants who, "depending on the will of other men," could not be trusted with the vote. Cf. C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962, pp. 107-36.
    
 

17. Free entry, secret ballot and majority rule, combined withpreponderant state ownership of capital, means that tenure of state power and hence the role of universal employer, is awarded to the party offering higher wages and shorter hours than its rival. Productivity, discipline on the job, consumption, investment are all determined on the hustings. Political competition ensures their greatest possible incompatibility, resulting in a total shambles.
    
 

The "Yugoslav road to socialism" can be interpreted as an attempt to get round the contradiction between state capitalism and bourgeois democracy, not by the obvious method of suppressing all political competition, but by taking it out at the level of the state and putting some of it back at the level of the individual state enterprise. Employees cannot elect the government, but they elect a workers' council and have some indirect say in the choice of the enterprise manager, the level of wages and profit-sharing bonuses and, hence, more indirectly still, in output and prices.

To the extent that this is so, the enterprise tends to maximize value added per employee, i.e. it will generally try to use more machines and materials and fewer people, than are collectively available. The resulting tendencies to chronic inflation accompanied by unemployment, are fought with complex administrative means. Politically, the system breeds insider cliques, caucuses and deals. Economically, it is prevented from being a total shambles by individual enterprises having, at least in principle, to compete for a living with each other and with imports on a spontaneously operating market; there is "commodity production for exchange."

Capital is said to be in social rather than in state ownership. It is impossible to find out what this means. It does not mean syndicalism, cooperative ownership or municipal socialism. It seems to me that it is intended to mean "good state ownership" in opposition to "bad state ownership" (in much the same way as "social" planning means good and "bureaucratic" planning means bad planning). Most of the owner's prerogatives are in practice exercised by state bureaux calling themselves "banks" rather than, as in orthodox socialist countries, "ministries" or "planning offices."

If this hybrid system is less suffocatingly totalitarian than the thoroughbred state capitalist world to the northeast of it, this is perhaps due as much to history, character and accident as to "systemic" differences.

57. One of the weakest of several weak reasons advanced byTrotsky why there is not and "there never will be" such a thing as state capitalism, was that "in its quality of universal repository of capitalist property, the state would be too tempting an object for social revolution" (Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What
Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going?, 5th edn, 1972, p. 246). He has, however, a more compelling reason: in his order of ideas, state capitalism must be privately owned; the state, like some giant corporation, must belong to shareholders able to sell and bequeath their shares. If they cannot sell and their sons cannot inherit, the system is not state capitalism. (While being sure of what it was not Trotsky had some changes of mind about what it was. See also A. Ruehl-Gerstel, "Trotsky in Mexico," Encounter, April 1982.)

It is sad to see a Marxist reduced to such a position. For Trotsky it ought to be "commodity production," the alienation of labour, its domination by capital and the mode of appropriation of surplus value which define the "relations of production," not whether shares are sold or inherited.

It must be added that Lenin's use of "state capitalism" to designate a system of private enterprise under close state control, was no worthier of socialist respect. In particular, it is hard to see how the state, which (despite some "relative autonomy") must, by virtue of the relations of production, be controlled and dominated by private enterprise, nevertheless controls it.

58.
Some of these and related ideas are formalized in the powerfulessay "La logique de la frustration relative" by Raymond Boudon in his Effets pervers et ordre social, 2nd edn, 1979. Prof. Boudon seeks to establish that the good observed correlation of discontent and frustration with improved chances, need not depend on some particular psychological assumption, but can be deduced from rationality alone, along the lines of utility-maximization in the face of risk.

At the other, non-rational end of the spectrum of human motives, Norman Cohn's classic work on medieval revolutionary mystics
finds the same correlation between better conditions and prospects and revolutionary action. See his account of the German Peasant War of 1525: "The well-being of the German peasantry was greater than it had ever been... [the peasants] far from being driven on by sheer misery and desperation, belonged to a rising and self-confident class. They were people whose position was improving both socially and economically" (Norman Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 1970, p. 245).

There is by now a sizeable body of literature in support of the thesis that revolutions typically follow the relaxation of pressures, the brightening of outlook, reforms. It seems to me important to stress that there may well be other good reasons for this than the supposition that reform is a symptom of the state being "on the run," getting weaker, hence becoming fair game for prudent revolutionaries who calculate risk-reward ratios.

59.
It is interesting to find expressly non-Marxist reasons fordefining state capitalism in the Leninist spirit as "the symbiosis of state and corporations" (in P. J. D. Wiles, Economic Institutions Compared, 1979, p. 51). What, then, is private capitalism, and how do we tell it apart from state capitalism? Wiles considers that the latter term is "abusively applied" to the Soviet Union because it "certainly has an ideology which sets it quite apart from real state capitalism." Real state capitalism, being "more or less indifferent about property" is devoid of a proper ideology.

This is true only in terms of a convention to define real state capitalism as one which is indifferent about property. Which actually existing systems, which countries would such a definition cover? Take the testimony of a prominent state capitalist, a member of one of the Grands Corps at the summit of the French civil service, later to become Minister of Industry: "no amount of dirigisme is worth a powerful public sector." (J-P. Chevènement,
Le vieux, la crise, le neuf, 1977, p. 180, my translation.) His state capitalism is certainly not indifferent about property. If there are state capitalisms that are, they are not conspicuous. Are they, perhaps, too easy to mistake for private capitalisms?

1. F. Engels, "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific," in K. Marxand F. Engels, Selected Works in One Volume, 1968, pp. 421-2, note.
   
 

2. The word is used here in a very general and non-pejorativesense, to include the category of hired managers and administrators who man the bureaux. It refers to a role in society and is not meant to express any like or dislike for it.
   
 

3. Cogitation and field research have, as I understand it, jointlyestablished that the technostructure is composed of people who make the decisions which require knowledge. (Obviously, few decisions are left for the rest of us to make.) The technostructure removes from ownership all reality of power. The "liturgical aspect" of economic life induces the technostructure to affirm the sanctity of private ownership. It is, however, equally adept at keeping in its place the private and the public shareholder. (Why, in that case, does it prefer to be faced by private shareholders, if only "liturgically"?) In any case, it would be "supreme foolishness" to fear one's shareholders. The technostructure is more interested in growth than in profit. And so on. These revelations are drawn from J. Kenneth Galbraith and N. Salinger, Almost Everyone's Guide to Economics, 1979, pp. 58-60.
   
 

4. Lenin, "The State and Revolution," p. 292.
   
 

5. Ibid., p. 340.
   
 

6. Ibid., p. 345.
   
7. A political philosopher of quiet distinction, whose "socio-economic origin" was at least consistent with some insight into these matters (for his father was the Premier of his country of origin) has disposed of the question in the following "holistic" terms: "Why should we suppose that... [institutions], when they have to choose between their corporate interests and the interests of the classes from which their leaders are mostly recruited, will ordinarily choose to sacrifice their corporate interests?" (John Plamenatz, Man and Society, 1963, vol. II, p. 370).
   
 

8. The exiled Trotsky's social theory of the Soviet Union is thatin it, capital belongs to the workers' state (or, as he ended up by putting it, "the counter-revolutionary workers' state"), but the working class is prevented from exercising the owner's prerogatives by the bureaucracy, which has won control of the state. The reason why the bureaucracy succeeds in usurping the role of the ruling class is scarcity. Where people have to queue for what they need, there will be a policeman regulating the queue; he " ';knows' who is to get something and who is to wait" (The Revolution Betrayed, p. 112).