WHAT A STATE TO BE IN...
Saverio Craparo
Part III - The evolution of the State
Although by the mid-19th century, the evolution of the State organism had already reached a point where its distinguishing features could be perceived (though Bakunin failed to do so for the above reasons, and Marx too, by the way), it was extremely difficult to forecast the tasks that the State would gradually adopt. Two considerations are worth developing here. On the one hand, the web of responsibilities the State would take on and their effect on the social organization as a whole. On the other hand, we should examine if the stage of statism has had only negative effects on human "progress" and, consequently, if it can be considered a parenthesis in the original human tendency towards mutual solidarity. Clearly, the answers to these two questions are anything but irrelevant in dealing with the analysis of today's struggles, even though it is most unlikely they can have, as we shall see, any effect on the prospects of reaching a society without classes and, for that very reason, without States.
3.1 The State as entrepreneur
When speaking of the modern State, three functions that the apparatus of State performs are often fused together, even though they are profoundly different and in no way mutually necessary. They are the regulation of the economic cycle, direct intervention in the economy and the welfare system. These three characteristics were all added during the course of the 20th century, in addition to the traditional role of guardian of bourgeois interests, well known to the revolutionaries of the 19th century.
Theoreticians of the advent of the techno-bureaucracy saw in this multiplication of prerogatives the confirmation of their expectations of a total englobing of society into the omnivorous monster of the State. In perfect continuity with Kropotkinist determinism, for them history is a one-way affair and the paths of social evolution are already marked out. In this way, the tendencies which existed between the 1930s and the 1970s are held to demonstrate unequivocally the future turn of events - their finalistic vision is simply the other side of the coin with respect to Marxism and both fail to take into account the functionality of social organization with the contingent interests of capital and consequently the reversibility of choices which seem to them to be definitive. Not by chance does the dismantlement of the State (which has been in course during the last two decades) leave them theoretically thrown and desperately grasping for proposals, if not decidedly and irremediably coherent with the moves of the leaders of the world's economy.
3.1.1 Control of the cycle
The impossibility of preventing the ever more devastating cycle of crises, after the failure of those marginalist theories [5] designed to interpret scientifically the state of the markets, led capital to drastically modify its features. In the course of the years from the early 1940s to the late 1970s, the State changed from being simply the guardian of capitalist interests (tax drainage, police control, customs policy, etc.) into a motor of the economy, by taking on responsibility - by means of substantial tax increases - for revitalizing the economic cycle which was precipitating towards the abyss of crisis.
A necessary consequence of this new economic form (Keynesianism) was the expansion of the market, an indispensable condition for the absorption of an ever-increasing quantity of goods, which depended on a perennial progressive cycle. Wages become the flywheel of the economic situation (Fordism) and increase, though at a level below productivity, driven by the technological innovations in the organization of work (Taylorism). It was an attempt to weaken the class struggle, turning it into a normal way of rationalizing the system.
Clearly, capitalism was inventing a new era of prosperity for itself, but at the same time, growing masses of the metropolitan proletariat in the industrialized countries were gaining access to goods which were once out of their reach. The period of struggle in the late '60s made it clear, though, that this situation did not translate into a permanent integration of the weaker classes into the commercial mindset. In fact, it was from the very sectors which could be said to be representative of the so-called working masses that the protests against the system emanated and to them that they continued.
3.1.2 The direct management of capital
A further step was taken in the 1930s. This evolution took place almost naturally, but it was a far from necessary one, so much so that it did not arise at the centre of the sapitalist system - the USA. Superficially, there is much in common between the situation that developed in the two antagonistic areas of totally-planned economies (the Soviet area) and directed-planning economies (capitalist Europe). But, as we will see, the two cases had certain characteristics that clearly indicate how different they were.
The first stimulus developed almost by chance in fascist Italy. Faced with the crisis in many industrial complexes, the regime set up the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI - Institute for Industrial Reconstruction) in 1933. This body took over struggling companies with the stated intention of re-introducing them into the market once they had been put in order. Instead, the IRI quickly found itself in possession of notable portions of industrial production and ended up holding onto them, managing them directly and creating a new sector - that of State Participation. The IRI survived the fascist era and following World War II became the most important player in the country's economic life. Its success in softening the blows of the economic cycle (thanks partly to the enormous availability of capital even from the State) was so great that British Labour Party members in the 1950s came to study it to see if it could be reproduced in the UK, followed by the French and Germans. Thus was born the State which participates directly in the country's economic life with its own capital - the State as businessman.
The Soviet economy was entirely a different affair. There, the State management of the economy was total and did not involve any competition. It was the result of the coming to power of a class which was not the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, but the educated petite bourgeoisie with its own methods of extracting surplus value [6]. These two systems provided different types of economic planning which were only nominally similar.
At this stage, we cannot avoid making a quick appraisal of this new role of the State which developed in continuity with, but not in consequence of, the previously-examined role as regulator and stimulator of the economic cycle. Those of us who remember the labour struggles of the Sixties and Seventies will certainly recall the fact that two different national labour contracts were signed for workers in a private companies and for workers in State Participation companies, with the latter often preceding the former. In this way, the terms of the latter were often seen as a target, thereby forcing the bosses of theprivate sector to reluctantly make greater concessions to their workers. However, in an age of rampant liberalism the State Participation firms became synonymous with corruption and waste and on a wave of emotional reaction were dismantled and sold off to the private sector. Thus it became possible for a model firm like the Nuovo Pignone in Florence (having been acquired by AGIP - part of the IRI group - and converted to a new type of production, having developed avant-garde technology, having won itself a good slice of the world market in its sector and having become an excellent source of profit for the State) to be sold off to its US competitor, General Electric.
Doubtlessly, certain elements within public sector management got rich through running the State Participation companies, but there is no doubt either that wage levels and workers' conditions in this privileged sector served as a reference point for other workers in their demands. It is therefore perfectly legitimate to think that perhaps the desperate drive to destroy this sector came about principally as a result of the needs of the bosses in the private sector to eliminate an uncomfortable competitor rather than from some vague and barely credible moral drive to eliminate corruption. Furthermore, the physical elimination of Enrico Mattei (president of AGIP and promoter of an autonomous supply of crude oil by-passing the international oil cartel, the Seven Sisters) on the orders of the oil companies is certainly food for thought.
3.1.3 Welfare
In the course of the 20th century, the State gradually took on the role of provider of social services (education, healthcare, social insurance, transport, etc.). The advantage for the bosses was obvious. Taxes (to which they contributed to a much lower degree than workers) paid for a whole series of services, giving the bosses a better-educated, healthier and (it was hoped) less restive workforce. But it is also true that for the workers there was an undeniable advantage, too. The alternative would not have been lower taxation (something we will come back to) but the abandoning of all forms of social protection to the jungle of profit - something which we are now witnessing in all clarity.
Welfare, in fact, was once known as "social salary" and was considered by workers' organizations as another form of pay for their work. Public education may have concentrated on the acquisition of the skills required for work, but it also enabled the weaker classes to gain access to general educational standards which had hitherto been impossible. If healthcare was designed to "repair" the damaged workforce, from another point of view it also guaranteed treatment of illnesses which had once cut swathes through the proletariat. While pensions often tended to transfer the costs of an obsolete or redundant workforce onto the whole of society, they can also be said to provide an alternative to the poorhouse and to the total degradation of old age which members of the weakest classes were once subjected to. The public transport system may have made it possible for huge numbers of the proletariat to be abandoned amid the marginalization of the outlying districts of cities, but it has to be said that it also allowed greater enjoyment of leisure time by large sections of the population which once had no access to mobility.
Refusing to examine the State in all its various guises is simply short-sighted.
As a result, there are those who think that if the State is the enemy, then everything that comes from the State must be rejected. But this type of reasoning does not take into account the other enemy - capitalism - which is today aiming at the destruction of the State. And there is yet another misconception, even more insidious but nonetheless erroneous: as the proletariat and capital have opposing interests, everything that goes to the advantage of the latter can only be to the disadvantage of the former.
But if this were the case, seeing that wages are undeniably at the lowest level that the bosses are prepared to cede in order to exploit the workforce fully and are thus an advantage to employers, then employees should refuse them. In effect, while we fight (or rather, should do) to increase wages at the cost of profit, we should at the same time be fighting to ensure that services are increasingly directed towards the exploited classes and increasingly away from the wealthier classes.
But this should never mean, obviously, that we renounce the revolutionary subverting of the system in order to obtain a just, free and egalitarian society.
3.2 From the primitive state to the modern State
As has been made clear from what we have said thus far, over the last 150 years, the State has substantially changed its role, its functions and its structure.
But, on the other hand, while Marxism separates the role of government (a bourgeois entrepreneurial committee, as it has been called) from that of the State as an apparatus, and therefore developed the concept of using the State machine for revolutionary ends, Anarchism, on the other hand, unites both functions and has ended up over time losing the ability to distinguish and, consequently, the capacity for political orientation.
We therefore need to think again about the whole question if we are to avoid the risk of accepting the apparatus of state as it is or avoid rejection a priori of anything that comes from the State, both of which would serve only to deliver us into the hands of aggressive neo-liberalism.
[5] Marginalist economic theories first appeared in the latter half of the 19th century following the long depression of 1866 and were the first attempt to predict and plan the market which, left alone to fluctuate, was provoking the cyclic crises predicted by Marx. The term marginalism was applied to these theories due to the concept of marginal utility, i.e. the value that seller and buyer respectively assign to the goods on sale, the latest in a series of goods at the disposal of the seller. Marginalism marked the massive entry of mathematics into the study of the economy. The principal exponents of this economic school of thought were Marshall, Jevons, Böhm-Bawerk, Menger, etc.
[6] The acquisition of the privileged part of the goods produced dies not come about by virtue of possession of the goods of production, formally under collective ownership, but of the bureaucratic control of the production-distribution cycle, exercised by virtue of having greater knowledge.
Next section: Part IV - Ambiguities in the role of the State