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THE
POWER OF THE STATE
[This is the first in a
series of articles examining the various institutions, structures and systems
of domination and exploitation which define our current existence. These
articles are not intended to be comprehensive nor to be final answers, but
rather to be part of a discussion that I hope will go on in anarchist circles
aimed at developing a specifically anarchist theoretical exploration of the
reality we are facing. A great deal of the analysis that currently goes on in
anarchist circles is dependent on marxist or postmodernist categories and
concepts. These may indeed be useful, but to simply accept them a priori,
without examining social reality in terms of our own specifically anarchist
revolutionary project indicates an intellectual laziness. So I hope we can
begin to discuss and examine the world in terms of our own projects, dreams and
desires, certainly grasping all analyses that we find useful, but in order to
create our own theoretical and practical revolutionary project.]
It is not
uncommon today, even in anarchist circles, to hear the state described as a
mere servant of the multinationals, the IMF, the World Bank and other
international economic institutions. According to this perspective, the state
is not so much the holder and arbiter of power as merely a coordinator of the
institutions of social control through which corporate economic rulers maintain
their power. From this it is possible to draw conclusions that are quite
detrimental to the development of an anarchist revolutionary project. If the
state is merely a political structure for maintaining stability that is
currently in the service of the great economic powers rather than a power in
its own right with its own interests maintaining itself through domination and
repression, then it could be reformed democratically made into an institutional
opposition to the power of the multinationals. It would simply be a matter of
“the People” becoming a counter-power and taking control of the state. Such an
idea seems to lie behind the absurd notion of certain contemporary
anti-capitalists that we should support the interests of nation-states against
the international economic institutions. A clearer understanding of the state
is necessary to counteract this trend.
The
state could not exist if our capacity to determine the conditions of our own
existence as individuals in free association with each other had not been taken
from us. This dispossession is the fundamental social alienation which provides
the basis for all domination and exploitation. This alienation can rightly be
traced to the rise of property (I say property as such and not just private
property, because from very early on a great deal of property was institutional—owned
by the state). Property can be defined as the exclusive claim by certain
individuals and institutions over tools, spaces and materials necessary for
existence, making them inaccessible to others. This claim is enforced through
explicit or implicit violence. No longer free to grasp whatever is necessary
for creating their lives, the dispossessed are forced to conform to conditions
determined by the self-proclaimed owners of property in order to maintain their
existence, which thus becomes an existence in servitude. The state is the institutionalization
of this process which transforms the alienation of the capacity of individuals
to determine the conditions of their own existence into the accumulation of
power into the hands of a few.
It is futile and unnecessary to try to
determine whether the accumulation of power or the accumulation of wealth had
priority when property and the state first arose. Certainly now they are
thoroughly integrated. It does seem likely that the state was the first institution
to accumulate property in order to create a surplus under its control, a
surplus that gave it real power over the social conditions under which its
subjects had to exist. This surplus allowed it to develop the various
institutions through which it enforced its power: military institutions,
religious/ideological institutions, bureaucratic institutions, police
institutions and so on. Thus, the state, from its origins, can be thought of as
a capitalist in its own right, with its own specific economic interests that
serve precisely to maintain its power over the conditions of social existence.
Like any capitalist, the state provides a
specific service at a price. Or more accurately, the state provides two
integrally related services: protection of property and social peace. It offers
protection to private property through a system of laws that define and limit
it and through the force of arms by which these laws are enforced. In fact,
private property can only be said to truly exist when the institutions of the
state are there to protect it from those who would simply take what they
want—without this institutional protection, there is merely the conflict of
individual interests. This is why Stirner described private property as a form
of social or state property to be held in contempt by unique ones. The state
also provides protection for the “commons” from external raiders and from that
which the state determines to be abuse by its subjects through law and armed
force. As the sole protector of all property within its borders—a role maintained
by the state’s monopoly on violence—it establishes concrete control over all
this property (relative, of course, to its real capacity for exercising that
control). Thus the cost of this protection consists not only of taxes and
various forms of compulsory service, but also of conformity to roles necessary
to the social apparatus that maintains the state and acceptance of, at best, a
relationship of vassalage to the state, which may claim any property or enclose
any common space “in the common interest” at any time. The existence of
property requires the state for protection and the existence of the state
maintains property, but always ultimately as state property regardless of how
“private” it supposedly is.
The implied violence of law and the
explicit violence of the military and the police through which the state
protects property are the same means by which it maintains social peace. The
violence by which people are dispossessed of their capacity to create life on
their own terms is nothing less than social war which manifests daily in the
usually gradual (but sometimes as quick as a police bullet) slaughter of those
who are exploited, excluded and marginalized by the social order. When people
under attack begin to recognize their enemy, they frequently act to
counter-attack. The state’s task of maintaining social peace is thus an act of social
war on the part of the rulers against the ruled—the suppression and prevention
of any such counter-attack. The violence of those who rule against those they
rule is inherent in social peace. But a social peace based solely on brute
force is always precarious. It is necessary for the state to implant the idea
in people’s heads that they have a stake in the continued existence of the
state and of the social order it maintains. This may take place as in ancient
Egypt where religious propaganda maintaining the divinity of the Pharaoh
justified the extortion by which he took possession of all the surplus grain
making the populace absolutely dependent on his good will in times of famine.
Or it may take the form of institutions for democratic participation which
create a more subtle form of blackmail in which we are obliged to participate
if we want to complain, but in which we are equally obliged to accept “the will
of the people” if we do participate. But, behind these forms of blackmail,
whether subtle or blatant, the arms, the prisons, the soldiers and the cops are
always there, and this is the essence of the state and of social peace. The
rest is just veneer.
Though the state can be looked upon as
capitalist (in the sense that it accumulated power by accumulating surplus
wealth in a dialectic process), capitalism as we know it with its “private”
economic institutions is a relatively recent development traceable to the
beginning of the modern era. This development has certainly produced
significant changes in the dynamics of power since a significant portion of the
ruling class are now not directly part of the state apparatus except as
citizens, like all those they exploit. But these changes do not mean that the
state has been subjugated to the various global economic institutions or that
it has become peripheral to the functioning of power.
If the state is itself a capitalist, with
its own economic interests to pursue and maintain, then the reason that it
works to maintain capitalism is not that it has been subordinated to other
capitalist institutions, but because in order to maintain its power it must
maintain its economic strength as a capitalist among capitalists. Specific
weaker states end up being subjugated to global economic interests for the same
reason that smaller firms are, because they do not have the strength to
maintain their own interests. The great states play at least as significant a
role in determining global economic policies as the great corporations. It is,
in fact, the arms of the state that will enforce these policies.
The power of the state resides in its legal
and institutional monopoly on violence. This gives the state a very concrete
material power upon which the global economic institutions are dependent.
Institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF do not only include delegates
from all the major state powers in all decision-making processes; they also
depend upon the military force of the most powerful states to impose their
policies, the threat of physical violence that must always stand behind
economic extortion if it is to function. With the real power of violence in
their hands, the great states are hardly going to function as mere servants to
the global economic institutions. Rather in proper capitalist form, their
relationship is one of mutual extortion accepted for the benefit of the entire
ruling class.
In addition to its monopoly on violence,
the state also controls many of the networks and institutions necessary to
commerce and production. Highway systems, railway systems, ports, airports,
satellite and fiber optic systems necessary to communications and information
networks are generally state-run and always subject to state control.
Scientific and technological research necessary to new developments in
production is largely dependent on the facilities of state-run universities and
the military.
Thus corporate power depends upon state
power to maintain itself. It is not a matter of the subjugation of one sort of
power to another, but the development of an integral system of power that
manifests itself as the two-headed hydra of capital and the state, a system
that functions as a whole to maintain domination and exploitation, the
conditions imposed by the ruling class for the maintenance of our existence.
Within this context, institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank are best
understood as means by which the various state and corporate powers coordinate
their activities in order to maintain unity of domination over the exploited
classes in the midst of the competition of economic and political interests.
Thus the state does not serve these institutions, but rather these institutions
serve the interests of the most powerful states and capitalists.
It is, thus, not possible for those of us
who seek the destruction of the social order to play the nation-state against
the capitalists and gain anything by it. Their greatest interest is the same,
to maintain the current order of things. For our part it is necessary to attack
the state and capitalism with all of our might, recognizing them as the
two-headed hydra of domination and exploitation that we must destroy if we are
ever to take back our capacity to create the conditions of our existence.