The Material Separation of State Politics from Regular Socioeconomic Politics “But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” (Karl Marx) As mentioned in the last chapter, class-strugglist anarchists differ from typical Marxists on the question of the state, among other questions. A synthetic definition of the state was provided, but what is the basis for this synthetic definition? Continuing with Marx’s account of the Paris Commune: The centralized state power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor – originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle class society as a mighty weapon in its struggle against feudalism. Still, its development remained clogged by all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies, and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. During the subsequent regimes, the government, placed under parliamentary control – that is, under the direct control of the propertied classes – became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes; with its irresistible allurements of place, pelf, and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling classes; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified the class antagonism between capital and labor, the state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism. What is not mentioned here is centralized state power in slave societies (whether in Europe, the Middle East, China, or elsewhere) or a similar role for the state structures of the much smaller feudal fiefdoms in medieval Europe and Japan. What is also not mentioned is the absence of state structures in the pre-capitalist societies of Native America, despite the civil-society hierarchies present in those societies and gender-based division of labour based on regular males, regular females, and “social males” (lesbians who were tasked with male social functions in their societies). With these insights, along with the clear emergence of the “bureaucratic” coordinator class in the Soviet Union and then in Western capitalist countries, it can be said that the state is first and foremost the sum of the repressive instruments for the rule of minority classes – and a very private and not public one according to Kantian reasoning. While civil-society functions like the building and maintenance of roads can be performed publicly but independent of a state apparatus, they are performed nevertheless by most states historically, with the effect of obscuring their primary function. Consider the emergence of the world’s first “welfare state” in the Germany of the 1880s: in order to counter the growing influence of the German worker movement under the banner of the (flawed) Gotha Program, the Junker landlord regime headed by Bismarck pushed forward the Health Insurance Bill in 1883, the Accident Insurance Bill in 1884, and the Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill in 1889. To end this obscurement, therefore, there should be a material separation of high politics, security politics, and all other related state politics from regular socioeconomic politics through the transference of the latter jurisdiction to sovereign socioeconomic governments directly representative of ordinary people. Thus, the separation of powers can exist in the wrong way, as is the case with the bourgeois separation of legislative and executive-administrative functions, or in the right way, in accordance with the participatory-democratic premise of parallelism. In regards to the Draft Program, this threshold demand could have been stated as a demand for the democracy question if it were indeed crucial towards the expropriation of ruling-class political power: All jurisdiction over regular socioeconomic politics shall be materially transferred to sovereign socioeconomic governments directly representative of ordinary people – separate from legislatures and executives responsible for high politics, security politics, and all other related state politics. If the demand were not as crucial, it could have been stated in the preamble leading to the minimum demands for transnational opposition – extending the phrase “can only be achieved by transnational class struggle” with “including the struggle for” accompanied by the demand itself – given the emphasis on “consistent, preferrably simultaneous, obviously complete, and especially lasting implementation.” While the mention of direct representation (inclusive of immediate recall) avoids the debate between demarchy and radical republicanism, it is nevertheless crucial as a reminder of historical precedents – even corporatist ones. In the new Soviet republic, there were factory committees and federal-level economic councils. Numerous Weimar Social-Democrats, including Rudolf Hilferding, toyed with the formation of economic parliaments based on labour, managerial, and consumer sectors of the population coming together – but nevertheless subordinated to the main parliament. Adolf Hitler himself once wrote an unfulfilled political measure about how, “before everything else, the trades unions are necessary as building stones for the future economic parliament, which will be made up of chambers representing the various professions and occupations” – undoubtedly based on the corporatism of the short-lived Italian Regency of Carnaro, a heavy influence on Benito Mussolini’s fascism. Then, of course, came the Western European corporatist model, whereby representatives of government, businesses, and unions met together on a regular basis and jointly determined economic policy. Except for the Soviet precedent, the common goal of these precedents was in line with Marx’s observation of a new class-conciliationist phenomenon in the 1850s: As against the coalesced bourgeoisie, a coalition between petty bourgeois and workers had been formed, the so-called Social-Democratic party [...] A joint program was drafted, joint election committees were set up and joint candidates put forward. The revolutionary point was broken off and a democratic turn given to the social demands of the proletariat; the purely political form was stripped off the democratic claims of the petty bourgeoisie and their socialist point thrust forward. Thus arose Social-Democracy [...] The peculiar character of Social-Democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. The most obvious concern to arise from this demand pertains to gray areas and the extent that regular socioeconomic politics can really be separated from the truly statist politics. Mentioned above was the responsibility of building and maintaining roads, with the broader concern involved being infrastructure. However, even before the rise of terrorism associated with political Islam, bourgeois governments included infrastructure questions in state security policy. Another aspect of state security is the military-industrial complex, even that part which deals merely with the notorious but profitable arms trade. Therefore, the concept of materiality is thus borrowed from the profession of auditing (dealing with the quantitative and qualitative significance of amounts, transactions, discrepancies, and disclosures), since in all material respects, most of the civilian economy has little to do with state security. For example, it would be ludicrous to suggest that residential area roads are a state security concern! Another concern is the possibility of opting out of paying taxes for certain things. On the one hand, there is the legal theory of conscientious objection to military taxation, whereby pacifists and others can refuse their tax money to be allocated to military spending. On the other hand, individualistic propertarians would want similar status for their conscientious objection, thereby not paying into and benefitting from the sovereign economic governments (especially those in charge of the “welfare state”); income thresholds for opting out may be a partial solution for this concern. Even if this demand could have been stated in the preamble leading to the minimum demands for transnational opposition, it would still not meet the Hahnel criterion for facilitating other threshold demands or even immediate and intermediate ones. This is because the other demands can be fulfilled without the fulfillment of this one. The suggested inclusion in the preamble would have merely been akin to a hypothetical, anti-opportunist inclusion of the political demand for the “democratic republic” in the Erfurt Program. Now, does this reform enable the basic principles to be “kept consciously in view”? Although this demand would end the obscurement between proper state functions and civil-society functions, how is this in accordance with the principle of social labour? Although I criticized monetary social-statism with Lenin as its face in my earlier work, quoted in that work was his own distinction between the two kinds of functions – notwithstanding the absence of a “welfare state” in pre-Soviet Russia: This brings us to another aspect of the question of the state apparatus. In addition to the chiefly "oppressive" apparatus – the standing army, the police and the bureaucracy – the modern state possesses an apparatus which has extremely close connections with the banks and syndicates, an apparatus which performs an enormous amount of accounting and registration work, if it may be expressed this way. This apparatus must not, and should not, be smashed. It must be wrested from the control of the capitalists; the capitalists and the wires they pull must be cut off, lopped off, chopped away from this apparatus; it must be subordinated to the proletarian Soviets; it must be expanded, made more comprehensive, and nation-wide. And this can be done by utilising the achievements already made by large-scale capitalism (in the same way as the proletarian revolution can, in general, reach its goal only by utilising these achievements). Thus, at least a large part of social labour would be planned and distributed by the sovereign socioeconomic governments. On the principle of class struggle and the distinction between the more well-known, economistic but traditional interpretation of “class warfare” and the Marxist definition of class struggle as being political, there is too much emotional attachment to glorified strike committees (better known as workers’ councils, or soviets) as the allegedly definitive organs of ruling-class power for the working class – undoubtedly rooted in the organizational defeatism that is stikhiinost. Although the Russian soviets of 1917 were not glorified strike committees, because of their size they soon ceased to be working bodies, with their executive-administrative functions being carried out by executive committees and by the equivalent of bourgeois cabinets known as the Council of People’s Commissars (Russian: Sovet Narodnykh Kommissarov - Sovnarkom). Moreover, unlike parliaments, cabinets or even the combined legislative-executive-administrative council of the Paris Commune, the soviets – like glorified strike committees – did not meet in continuous session to at least hold subordinate bodies to account, instead meeting once every few months at best. This is why, historically, the slogan “all power to the soviets” is ultimately an infantile sham; no emergence of glorified strike committees have posed the question of dual power except where such councils have been created and coordinated by political parties. Glorified strike committees dare not become government organizations! REFERENCES: The Civil War in France by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...rance/ch05.htm] Sexuality and Gender in Certain Native American Tribes: The Case of Cross-Gender Females by Evelyn Blackwood [http://www.jstor.org/pss/3174235] An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? by Immanuel Kant [http://www.marxists.org/reference/su...ightenment.htm] A History of Modern Germany: 1840-1945 by Hajo Holborn [http://books.google.com/books?id=Y4p...gbs_navlinks_s] The Experience of the Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution by Rod Jones [http://www.geocities.com/Athens/acro...y/FACTRY09.HTM] Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler [http://www.hitler.org/writings/Mein_Kampf/mkv2ch12.html] La Carta Del Carnaro by Alceste De Ambris and Gabriele D'Annunzio [http://www.reakt.org/fiume/charter_of_carnaro.html] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx...maire/ch03.htm] Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...917/oct/01.htm] Reform coalition, or mass strike? by Mike Macnair [http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/618/Mc...0Strategy3.htm] The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky by Vladimir Lenin [http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...anisations.htm]
Jacob, are you actually genuinely interested in discussion, or just battering us over the head with screeds of text. Can you summarise your questions in a few lines?
