[GegenStandpunkt Index]
[Contents]
[Introduction]
1
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
The Democratic State
Critique of Bourgeois Sovereignty
Chapter 1
Freedom and Equality
Private Property
Abstract Free Will
The bourgeois state (i.e., the modern democratic state)
is the political power over a capitalistic society. It forces its rule on all
of the competitors in this mode of production without regard to their natural
and social differences, thereby allowing them to pursue their conflicting
particular interests. This is what equality and
freedom are, nothing else. The state obliges its citizens to
respect private property in their economic competition. It
forces them to recognize that some people have the wealth of society at their
disposal while others are excluded from it, and to base their economic actions
on this principle. In pursuing their individual advantage the members of a
capitalistic society inevitably harm each other, so that they require a power
removed from economic life to guarantee respect for person and property. They
supplement their negative, competitive relation to each other by jointly
submitting to a power that curtails their private interests. As they go about
their economic business, they are at the same time political citizens. They
want state rule because they can pursue their private interests only by
simultaneously abstracting from them. The bourgeois state is thus the
abstract free will of its citizens that has taken on a form
independent of them.
a) How competitors become free and equal citizens
This first determination of what the state is, its conception in the
abstract, contains the central reason why this authority exists, and thus also
the central purpose that it pursues. Before turning to the specific ways in
which the state relates to its citizens, one can already see from this
abstract formulation that freedom and equality are hardly an idyllic matter.
Firstly, they owe their existence to economic conflicts and,
secondly, they are aimed at maintaining these conflicts by means of
the state’s monopoly on force. The state uses its power to keep the capitalist
economy running, but even without examining this mode of production one can
see that this state is a class state. By subjecting everyone
equally, it perpetuates the differences that exist between them.
There is consequently no doubt about how it benefits the various
competitors of a capitalist mode of production.
By treating citizens equally the state guarantees their freedom, which
consists in nothing but the not-so-kind permission to try to get hold of some
part of the wealth of society with whatever economic resources they may or may
not have, while respecting all the other citizens who are doing the same thing
at their expense, against them. It is for the sake of this freedom that they
need the state, since without it they could not make use of their resources at
all. From their practical point of view, state power is the condition for free
competition. They thus want to be recognized as citizens of
a state because their economic interests force them to.
The bond between all citizens of the state, their common political will,
is the result of a forced act of volition on the part of each individual who,
in order to reach his or her goal of private advantage, also participates in
an abstract and general will. “The separation of bourgeois
society and the political state necessarily appears as a separation of the
political member of bourgeois society, the citizen, from bourgeois
society, his own actual, empirical reality, because as an idealist of the
state he is a being who is completely distinct, different from, and
opposed to his own reality” (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of
Right’, Cambridge University Press 1970, p.79). It is no secret how this
effort in abstraction has different results for the various characters
involved in the capitalist mode of production, how and for whom the state acts
forcefully as an instrument. The subjection of everyone to state
power is necessarily to the advantage of those citizens who are
already advantaged economically. The following chapters will
therefore show what the state demands from and allows the various economic
classes as a consequence of making free competition its business.
b) How the state keeps competition in tune with private property
If economic competition is to take place at all, the state must regulate
it by force. And this fact sheds some light on the nature of the economy the
state is maintaining. The interdependence of the individuals involved in
producing the wealth of society is organized in such a way that they
contest each other’s participation in this wealth when pursuing their
own interests. Since, in such a system, the satisfaction of one individual’s
particular interest negates the interests pursued by other individuals,
everyone submits to the power of the state, and this submission has a
negative, excluding effect for each person. This of course
does not make their collisions disappear. Rather, the state regulates them by
limiting each individual’s freedom by the freedom of everyone else.
Since economic competitors exclude each other from the resources
necessary for their subsistence, competition is a rather nasty fight for
survival. The state responds to the fighting by making this exclusion
obligatory while prohibiting assaults on property and life. Everyone must make
do with his or her own resources while being generally dependent on
everyone else, who use their own resources as they see fit. Newly produced
goods also may only be acquired by respecting property and
person. Private property, the exclusive disposal over the
wealth of society which other individuals require for their subsistence and
must therefore utilize somehow, is the basis of individual advantage, and
naturally also of disadvantage. It is the source of the modern form of
poverty, whereby people must sustain themselves as instruments for other
people’s property (whose growth is naturally of some concern to the state.)
Finally, it should be mentioned that private property is not a matter of
toothbrushes and lemonade, although it does show its effects in the sphere of
individual consumption too. The real dependency on things which belong to
other individuals exists in the sphere of the production and reproduction of
the wealth of society. When there is exclusive disposal over the means of
production and therefore over the products themselves, wealth acquires the
power to deny people their existence.
c) Historical remarks
The state idealism practiced by antagonistic classes, their
submission to a political power out of self interest, is no
pastoral picnic. Likewise, the “establishment of the
state” was never a harmonious affair, although it is considered
a cause for celebration in every nation when its anniversary comes around.
Bourgeois states are the product of choice terror. This tends to be forgotten
by their proponents, and not only when it comes to the glorious French and
American Revolutions. Antagonistic classes joined forces to abolish pre-
bourgeois forms of state power for fairly different reasons. One class
regarded the old state and the estates supporting it as a hindrance to its
business. The other class was fighting for its existence, which it had to
secure by its labor. Of course once their common goal was reached, it did not
turn out to the satisfaction of both classes, since what the democratic state
protected, the possibility of sustaining oneself in the service of
other people’s property, quickly became a bitter necessity. The fact
that the workers who fought for the bourgeois republic had to get rid of the
old state in order to live, does not mean that they created an instrument for
themselves when they helped create the new state.
d) Ideologies
Discontent with the hard world of private property is a source of most
persistent ideologies.
Leftists tend to interpret the many disagreeable consequences
of freedom and equality (which will come up in the next chapters) as evidence
that these two goals of the French Revolution have not yet been fully
realized. In view of the evident differences in society, they doubt the
reality of equality under state power. They turn equality into an
ideal and demand that the state make it come true. It somehow never
occurs to them that there must be something wrong with a kind of
freedom that is maintained by force.
The foolish vision of a society which has abolished, not the economic
conflicts between people, but their individual differences is a favorite theme
for utopian novels and movies. It is also cited by politicians, who like to
fend off all criticism of the state by magnanimously rejecting all
nonsense about making everyone equal. This kind of
repudiation of demands on the state is supposed to drum up the right
kind of enthusiasm for the state. Fatuous comparison with the ancient past
(the Soviets were once also useful for this game) has the same purpose, by
revealing an idiotic “conflict between freedom and
equality.” To get more of one you supposedly have to give up
some of the other, so that you can’t have everything anyway, so stop
complaining and start practicing the third basic value,
fraternity (which is known as “solidarity” or
“unity” nowadays). One can see that discontent with other people’s
discontent is also fertile soil for false ideas about the most abstract
determination of the state.
Those who take a positive stance towards the state proclaim that the
state is “in everyone’s interest.” They attempt to make the
obvious disadvantages of state actions acceptable by explaining the state as a
necessary evil. The proof that the state is necessary because
of human nature is part of the standard repertoire of every
enlightened teacher and professor, who in this case cite the conflicts of a
capitalistic society, for a change, instead of the lovable differences. This
proof only works if one ignores the necessity to compete that the
state imposes, along with all the economic peculiarities this
involves, and declares that gratuitous mutual hostility is human
nature. Man is a wolf to man, ergo some wolves have to make sure the other
wolves keep quiet. This is supposed to be why it is necessary for the state
to maintain order.
In everyday life, any criticism of the state’s actions which points to a
discrepancy with one’s own interests is refuted simply by the remark that
there must be order. Where would we end up if everything belonged to everyone?
This expresses the willingness to contend against other individuals in pursuit
of one’s own interest and at the same time to defend the limits that the
political order forces on oneself and everyone else, a self-contradictory will
which thrives in a democracy. It also flourishes in its fascist variation that
disapproves of competitive self-interest, requiring in the name of true
freedom that all individuals subordinate their endeavors entirely to the
community.
Public speakers on equality and freedom, who claim to have discovered in
their own particular state the kind of order appropriate to mankind,
can fall back on scientific literature for a detailed and well-prepared
elaboration of this brazen lie. None of the social sciences or humanities
(true to their name) can pass up the chance to provide a definition of man.
The slight variations they offer on the theme, “Man is by nature an
animal, but usually proves capable of higher things!” are due to the
interest the particular discipline has in contributing to these “higher
things.” All these sciences concern themselves with the two sides shown
by citizens, their materialism of competition and their
idealism of the state dictated by their dependence on it. And they
proceed to transform this historical product, the bourgeois state, into an
anthropological constant, making the bourgeois contortions of the will appear
to be a confirmation of human nature, whether in terms of psychology,
educational theory, economics, political science or theories of literature and
language. As if these disciplines did not all owe their existence to the fact
that individuals resist the need to abstract from themselves!
Marx has written all that must be said about the fable that a group of
individuals entered into a social contract, as well as about the role of
Robinson Crusoe in intellectual history! Evidently, academics just have to pay
homage to human dignity, especially since they feel compelled to come up with
criteria for distinguishing which deeds, of all those performed by humans
taking the bourgeois state for granted, are in fact
“inhuman.”
[GegenStandpunkt Index]
[Contents]
[Introduction]
1
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
© GegenStandpunkt 1993