The State by Anthony de Jasay

by Anthony de Jasay

  Some measures, in addition to reproducing the state's power, may contribute to its other ends as well. Their nature is such that no presumption stands to the contrary. When a President Peron or a contemporary African government pampers the urban masses, we

  can say that it "must" be doing so because it has staked its political survival on their support (or acquiescence), but it is not absurd to allow that it likes them, too. Hence, it may be actually pleased to make workers, clerks and soldiers better off at the expense of haughty cattle barons or obtuse tribal villagers. The shape of these measures reveals their support-buying, power-maintaining function, yet it permits the supposition that some other end is being fulfilled, too. Much of the redistribution undertaken by the modern democratic state has this shape.

  There is sufficient historical evidence, however, of a clear-cut class of other policies and acts of state which use state power without intelligibly, plausibly visibly contributing to its maintenance. The religious policies of James II, Charles XII of Sweden's campaigns or the profligacy of the Naples Bourbons have, if anything, weakened their hold on power. Gladstone's failed attempts to give Home Rule to Ireland, the Kulturkampf fought by the Second Reich, or American near-belligerence on Britain's side in 1940 used up some of the support enjoyed by the respective governments. Though they may have been the right thing to do, it is hard to argue that they were good politics. If such policies are nevertheless pursued, they "must" fulfil an end other than the prolongation of the tenure of power. When Peter the Great brought in Germans to run Russia, made himself odious and ruthlessly upset the old ways, he was using up power in the short run (he had a margin to spare) even if the longer-run effects strengthened the throne (which is arguable).

  A parallel should make the distinction clearer still. Conceptually, we are used to the idea of "subsistence wages." Marx has built his whole unfortunate theory of value and capital on the idea of the labour-time "socially necessary" for the reproduction of labour.

  Only a part of the labourer's time is used up to produce the subsistence he needs to go on labouring, and subsistence is all he gets.*36 No matter that subsistence turns out to be impossible to pin down. As an idea, it is simple and powerful and it leads straight to surplus value and the class struggle. In our framework, the use of the power necessary for its own maintenance takes the place of the subsistence wage spent on the maintenance of the labourer. The surplus value that his labour time has produced in addition, accrues to capital as the pay-off to domination. In our scheme, "surplus value" would correspond to whatever satisfactions the state can afford to procure for itself over and above the maintenance of its tenure of power. Another, less "analytical" parallel is that between income and discretionary income, power and discretionary power.

  4.6.9 Discretionary power is what the state can use to make its subjects listen to Bach and not listen to rock; to change the course of mighty rivers and transform nature; to build presidential palaces and government offices in keeping with its taste and sense of proportion; to deal out rewards and privileges to those who deserve it and to keep down those who deserve that, regardless of political expediency; to do good and aid causes its subjects care little about; to pursue national greatness; to invest in the wellbeing of a distant posterity and to make others adopt its values.

  4.6.10 Our theory would not be a social theory if it had no sting in its tail, no indirect, roundabout secondary effects and no "feedback loops." Thus, it is entirely likely that once the state has made people observe the cult of Bach, and they have in due course taught themselves to like it, they will "identify" better with the state which gave them their tastes. Likewise, the splendour of the presidential palace, the achievement of national greatness and "being first on the moon" may in the end implant in the public consciousness a certain sense of the state's legitimacy, a perhaps growing willingness to obey it regardless of hope of gain and fear of loss. Hence, they may serve as a cunning and slow-acting substitute for buying consent. Like Peter the Great's administrative reform, however, they require a discretionary margin of power now even if they are certain to yield greater legitimacy or a stronger repressive apparatus or both later.

  Instead of saying, tautologically, that the rational state pursues its interests and maximizes its ends, whatever they are, I propose to adopt, as a criterion of its rationality, that it seeks to maximize its discretionary power.*37, *38

  Discretionary power permits the state to make its subjects do what it wants, rather than what they want. It is exercised by taking their property and liberty. The state can appropriate people's money and buy things (including their services) with it. It can also override their spontaneous intentions and order them to serve its purposes. When the state is defending its tenure in open competition, however, all the property and liberty it can take is, by the definition of competitive equilibrium, absorbed in the "reproduction" of power, i.e. in the maintenance of its tenure by redistribution. The existence of a discretionary surplus would contradict the assumption of competition, under which it is impossible so to rearrange or enrich the redistributive pattern as to obtain more support for it (cf. the earlier section of this chapter on the "profitless," break-even character of equilibrium). This condition loses some of its precision and rigidity as we move to lower levels of abstraction; we introduce fuzziness, a margin of error, but no novel set of reasons to render likely the emergence of an appreciable discretionary surplus.

  At this point, the state has completed its unwitting transformation, from being the seducer freely offering utilitarian improvement, one-man-one-vote and distributive justice, to being the drudge only just coping with its self-imposed redistributive obligations. Moreover, it has entrapped itself in several predicaments at once. One is competition, being on the treadmill. Another is the changing character of society in response to its own redistributory activity, notably addiction to aid, free-rider behaviour by each interest group towards all others and progressive loss of control over redistribution. An extreme form of this predicament is to be up against an "ungovernable" society. Finally, as direct redistribution is overlaid by ever thicker layers of churning, in the ultimate democratic predicament there is no possible equilibrium: society both demands and refuses the state's redistributive role. The latter, in maintaining consent, ought both to go on expanding and to "roll itself back."

  Were we to dismiss this terminal self-contradiction as mere dialectic word-play and allow equilibrium to persist, however, the latter would still not represent a proper maximum for the state, except in the tenuous sense in which the earning of the subsistence wage is a "maximum" for the labourer. With no, or negligible, discretionary power, the state is better off than in any other available posture, in each of which it would lose power altogether and be replaced by its opposition.*39 It is rational for it to cling to this position. It may well content itself with it and just soldier on. Nevertheless, if it could deliberately change some of the available alternatives, i.e. modify in its favour the social and political environment to which it adjusts when "maximizing," it could make itself better off. Recognition of some such possibility (though not necessarily any action to realize it) may in fact be

  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.

  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 differ
ent 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.

  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.

  4.6.17

  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.

  People will finally be stopped from claiming through politics what is denied them by economics.

  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.)

  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

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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."

  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.

  In the consciousness of state and public alike, this apocalyptic agenda must take on a prosaic, quiet, down-to-earth and anodyne as
pect. 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."

  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.