WHAT A STATE TO BE IN...
Saverio Craparo
Part IV - Ambiguities in the role of the State
Much has been said about the absolutist or theocratic State, the pure expression of the power of a privileged caste (and against which Bakunin's criticisms were directed), which still existed in many countries in the mid-18th century, though not for much longer. Our attention, however, is best concentrated on the liberal State which by now is firmly established throughout the world with a high level of capitalist development (and that it is the lesser of two evils is only too clear to those "third-world" countries which are still living under oppressive dictatorships).
It is true that bourgeois rights are fictitious - the State is never impartial. In a society divided by class, even the consequences of illegality are divided by class. But it does no harm to keep in mind the old saying about throwing the baby out with the bathwater - even if the water is very dirty and the baby very small. And for two good reasons. The first is simply that it would be stupid to sacrifice the baby. The second is that we would be helping our class enemy, who is trying to hold on to the bathwater but wants to throw out the baby.
4.1 The State in the revolution
One point on which Anarchists have always been in disagreement with Marxists is regarding the need for the survival of the State during the transitional period. The use of the State's functions in order to spread and defend the revolution, according to the followers of so-called scientific socialism; decentralization and direct management of society by the proletariat, in order to ensure that the proletariat immediately takes control of the revolution as the solution for the problems generated by class society, for Anarchist Communists.
Marxists have accused Anarchist positions of being cooperativist, sustaining that if our methods were followed the result would be conflict and inequality, not to mention an inability to defeat the inevitable bourgeois reaction. For their part, Anarchists have maintained that the survival of a centralized power (the State) would generate a new expropriator class and would distance the masses from the revolution. Experience has provided unequivocal evidence of the truth of this. Moreover, there have been notable examples of solidarity between the dispossessed whenever the revolutionary self-management of the proletariat has had even the slightest possibility to exist freely.
Having established that, let us now look at the matter a little more carefully. First of all, Anarchists' legitimate criticism has led them towards a slippery slope which could be fatal unless it is adequately dealt with. Solidarity is a blueprint for civilization which humans must be educated into and it is not by chance that the examples we have already mentioned all occurred in places where revolutionary militants had already been exerting their influence for some time, in other words where the masses were better prepared for revolution. Put another way, it would be dangerous to confuse anarchy, which is the final condition of human evolution (the result of a growth of civilization and the awareness of our role in society), with the primordial conduct of man the animal - violent, crude and aggressive.
In the second place, we need to avoid confusion in our goals. It is power which must not be concentrated, in other words government and the State in the sense of the administration from above to below (legislative power) of the res publica. Instead, it is important to maintain a centralized role (on the basis of free agreement from below, obviously) for public services in order to guarantee the same rights for everyone. The Spanish anarchists in 1936 had no doubts. Knowing full well that the revolution can succeed only if everything works from day one (as far as possible) with regard to supplies and to services, they ensured that the workers organized public services (for example transport in Barcelona) in order to keep them operational.
It follows from this that though it is right for the bourgeois State apparatus to be demolished and not transformed (as some have said in the past), the same cannot be said where public services are concerned - children's education, care of the elderly and the sick, public transport and so on. It can also be deduced that where such services already exist and are provided to citizens on the basis of equality, then the transition to collectivized management by the workers of those sectors will be so much easier than would be the case if these services were to be sold off piecemeal to the private sector and forced to operate in order to create profit.
4.2 The Number One Enemy
Marxists have always maintained the entire evolution of history to be determined by structure (the production system with its related social relations), while other aspects such as politics, culture and war are merely more or less direct consequences of the structure, even though they bring their own effects (superstructure).
Anarchists, on the other hand, agree that the structure is the primary source of the social system (history is the history of the class struggle), but that the superstructure is not so closely dependent on it, that it has a life of its own and that at times it can even interact with the structure, contributing to its development. [A brief aside: strangely enough, Marxists developed a notable taste for political involvement and electoral activity, whereas Anarchists developed a fanatical lack of interest in these areas.]
As for the State, Marxists drew the conclusion that, once the production relationships (ownership) had changed as a result of the revolution, the superstructure of the State should continue to exist until such times as its functions became unnecessary (on the basis of this, Trotskyists speak about the USSR as a degenerated workers' State, ignoring the complete failure of the revolutionary ideals as a result of the new Soviet bureaucratic apparatus). Anarchists maintain that it is essential to abolish the State apparatus immediately, substituting it with alternative forms of cooperative associationism, as we are convinced that power can regenerate exploitation even if the exploitation is initially abolished as a result of the revolution - something which clearly came true in the case of the USSR.
Once again, the principle was good but the course of time and bad propaganda caused a corruption of the principle in an extremely dangerous way. By forgetting that our prime enemy is the exploitation by one man of another (as Bakunin well knew) and that the State was one of the historic manifestations of exploitation and was neither the only one nor a necessary one, Anarchists have confused the theory of the transitional phase with the theory of history and have ended up proclaiming the State as the proletariat's number one enemy (and even, for some, its only enemy!). Marxist "statophilia" has been counterbalanced by an equally obtuse Anarchist "statophobia". In other words, they have concentrated their criticism on capital's instrument of domination developed during one particular historical phase, only to forget the domination itself and the various other forms it can take. And all because of the fear that the State might once again reproduce the exploitation should it survive during the revolutionary phase.
This is the reason why much Anarchist writing talks of the State being the main enemy and why anyone who claims instead that our main enemy is the bourgeoisie is accused of being a crypto-Marxist. So why, then, is the boss class now aiming at the dissolution of the State? And why do some extremist fringe elements of US neo-liberalism (like Friedmann) even recommend privatizing police forces? Let us not forget that in Italy, the Mafia and the various other "societies of honour" were born as a form of social and police control in those parts of the country where, the exploitative production relationships not having been abolished, the unified State was not present, not even for the purposes of enforcing the law. A society can be created without State and without economic equality, a society which would be dear to those American anarcho-capitalists. Unfortunately, the subtle poison of this idea can be absorbed in homeopathic doses by anarchists without them even noticing it.
4.3 Collective functions and coercive functions
As we near the end of this study, it must be repeated that a generic approach to the subject of the State cannot move us forward (and can actually set us back). We therefore need to distinguish between the various functions of the modern State (or at least what they were until the recent neo-liberal attack), between the functions of social order both in one single area and internationally (the Warfare State, as some have called it), and the functions of assuring minimum standards of security to citizens (the Welfare State, in other words). The various functions are often linked and support each other but this does not take away from the fact that they are based on different principles. The former are purely coercive and have no place within an egalitarian society, whereas the latter are designed to ease social integration and have a role to play that any society worthy of the name would wish to cover, albeit with necessary changes in their form.
However, the way things are going at present, it seems that the direction we are going in is not the one we would like. It is a road which capitalism has taken with great willingness. The elimination of the Welfare State and the maintaining, and indeed strengthening, of the Warfare State. EU treaties, the growth of NATO, the development of professional armies in Italy and other countries - all these point in the same direction, a direction which, among other things, excludes any consistent diminution in the tax burden, at least as far as employees are concerned.
In fact, we could add that anything other than a development of the Welfare State only plays into the hands of the class enemy. It is the struggle for the Welfare State that can prepare us for (and not move us further away from) the collective and solid self-management of relationships. Instead, it seems that for some so-called anarchists, the evil lies in public healthcare, education and social security because they are provided by State bodies, and not the exploitation of illness, knowledge and old age for profit.
But let us not forget that while the State is an obstacle to any revolutionary success and that it must disappear from the very start of any future revolution in the relationships between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, its appearance in history was a step forward from the barbarism that preceded it and that its disappearance, if not accompanied by a revolutionary change in the relationships of ownership, will end up pushing us further from and not bringing us closer to our goal.
Next section: Part V - A few groundrules