The State. Anthony de Jasay
less abstract version (“Addictive Redistribution”) where people, and hence their interests, differ in an indefinite variety of respects, and the society within which preponderant support must be obtained is not atomistic but can have intermediate group structures between man and state, yields results which are fuzzier but hardly less bleak for the state. Redistributive gains tend to be habit-forming both at the individual and the group level. Their reduction is apt to provoke withdrawal symptoms. While in the state of nature the integration of people into cohesive interest groups is held in check by (potential or actual) “free riding,” the emergence of the state as the source of redistributive gains both permits and incites unchecked group formation to exact such gains. This is so in as much as state-oriented interest groups can tolerate the free riding among their members that would destroy market-oriented groups.
Each interest group, in turn, has an incentive to act as a free rider in relation to the rest of society, the state being the vehicle permitting this to be done without meeting serious resistance. There is no reason to expect the corporatist ideal of constituting very large groups (all labour, all employers, all doctors, all shopkeepers) and having them bargain with the state and with each other, greatly to alter this outcome. Thus, in time, the redistributive pattern becomes a crazy quilt of loopholes and asymmetrical favours along industrial, occupational or regional dimensions or for no very apparent rhyme and reason, rather than along the classic rich-to-poor or rich-to-middle dimension. Above all, the evolution of the pattern increasingly escapes the state’s overall control.
In the section “Rising Prices” the group structure of society promoted by addictive redistribution is assumed to impart an ability to each group to resist or recover any loss of its distributive share. One symptom of the resulting impasse is endemic inflation. A related one is the complaint of the state about society becoming ungovernable, lacking any “give” and rejecting any sacrifice that adjustment to hard times or just random shocks would require.
The social and political environment resulting in large part from the state’s own actions eventually calls forth a widening divergence between gross and net redistribution (“Churning”). Instead of robbing Peter to pay Paul, both Peter and Paul come to be paid and robbed on a growing variety of counts (much gross redistribution for a small and uncertain net balance); this causes turbulence and is destined to generate disappointment and frustration.
The state has, at this stage, completed its metamorphosis from mid-nineteenth-century reformist seducer to late twentieth-century redistributive drudge, walking the treadmill, a prisoner of the unintended cumulative effects of its own seeking after consent (“Towards a Theory of the State”). If its ends are such that they can be attained by devoting its subjects’ resources to its own purposes, its rational course is to maximize its discretionary power over these resources. In the ungrateful role of drudge, however, it uses all its power to stay in power, and has no discretionary power left over. It is rational for it to do this just as it is rational for the labourer to work for subsistence wages, or for the perfectly competitive firm to operate at breakeven. A higher kind of rationality, however, would lead it to seek to emancipate itself from the constraints of consent and electoral competition, somewhat like Marx’s proletariat escaping from exploitation by revolution, or Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs escaping from competition by innovation. My thesis is not that democratic states “must” all end up doing this, but rather that a built-in totalitarian bias should be taken as a symptom of their rationality.
Autonomy of action in the passage from democracy to totalitarianism need not be regained in a single unbroken move, planned in advance. It is, at least initially, more like sleep-walking than conscious progress towards a clearly perceived goal. Chapter 5, “State Capitalism,” deals with the cumulative policies likely to carry the state step by step along the road to “self-fulfilment.” Their effect is so to change the social system as to maximize the potential for discretionary power, and to enable the state fully to realize this potential.
The agenda for increasing discretionary power (“What Is to Be Done?”) must first address the problem of decreasing civil society’s autonomy and capacity for withholding consent. The policies the democratic state managing a “mixed economy” tends to drift into will unwittingly erode a large part of the basis of this autonomy, the independence of people’s livelihoods. What the Communist Manifesto calls “the winning of the battle of democracy” in order “to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state” is the completion of this process. The socialist state thus puts an end to the historical and logical freak of economic power being diffused throughout civil society while political power is centralized. In centralizing and unifying the two powers, however, it creates a social system which is inconsistent with, and cannot properly function under, the classical democratic rules of awarding tenure of state power. Social democracy must evolve into people’s democracy or the next best thing, the state now being powerful enough to enforce this development and ward off systemic breakdown.
“Systemic constants” versus the variables of the human element are considered in the context of private and state capitalism (“The State as Class”) to assess the place of the managing bureaucracy. As the thesis that separation of ownership and control really means loss of control by the owner is untenable, it must be accepted that the bureaucracy has precarious tenure and its discretionary power is limited. The nice or nasty disposition of the bureaucrats manning the state, their “socio-economic origin” and whose father went to which school, are variables, the configurations of power and dependence characterizing private and state capitalism respectively are constants; in such phrases as “socialism with a human face,” the weight of the constants of socialism relative to the variables of the human face is best seen as a matter of personal hopes and fears.
In state capitalism more inexorably than in looser social systems, one thing leads to another and, as one inconsistency is eliminated, others emerge, calling in turn for their elimination. The final and futuristic section of this book (“On the Plantation”) deals with the logic of a state which owns all capital, needing to own its workers, too. Markets for jobs and goods, consumer sovereignty, money, employee-citizens voting with their feet are alien elements defeating some of the purposes of state capitalism. To the extent that they are dealt with, the social system comes to incorporate some features of the paternalistic Old South.
People have to become chattel slaves in relevant respects. They do not own but owe their labour. There is “no unemployment.” Public goods are relatively plentiful, and “merit goods” like wholesome food or Bach records, cheap, while wages are little more than pocket money by the standards of the outside world. People have their ration of housing and public transport, health care, education, culture and security in kind, rather than receiving vouchers (let alone money) and the corresponding onus of choosing. Their tastes and temperaments adjust accordingly (though not all will become addicts; some may turn allergic). The state will have maximized its discretionary power, before eventually discovering that it is facing some new predicament.
An agenda for a rational state gives rise, by implication, to an inverted agenda for rational subjects, at least in the sense of telling them what must be done to help or to hinder it. If they can purge any inconsistent preferences they may have for more liberty and more security, more state and less state at the same time—probably a more difficult undertaking than it sounds—they will know how far they want to assist or resist carrying out the state’s agenda. On such knowledge must depend their own stand.
Violence, Obedience, Preference
Preferences for political arrangements depend on people’s conception of their good as well as on the arrangements that are supposed to be preferred.
States generally start with somebody’s defeat.
“The origin of the state is conquest”