Some left-wing professors would call us arrogant for claiming to have figured out what bourgeois states and democracy are all about, since their chief discovery in this field is how "complicated" it all is. Some go so far as to deny even the possibility of completing the theory of the state, since each state has a "different historical development." As if the general cannot be found in the particular! What else is a theory? Each of the different states is in fact a state, as the name implies. They have common principles, and these principles are what a theory explains. The professors can examine the differences between, say, English and German law, or between Italian and German social provisions, until the cows come home. But as long as they insist on denying the concepts of law and social state in general, the particular analysis of Germany, Italy or any other state has to come out wrong. And wrong it comes out without fail!

Some other leftist state theoreticians, reading here to find how we have answered their favorite questions, should take heed. We don't even bother to ask them!

"What could the state do to...?" Or, "What prevents the state from doing...?" These inquiries only serve to announce an ideological concern for how the state should be, not for how it is. The practical activity of leftists, to try to improve the alleged "deficiencies" of society, goes hand in hand with their theories consisting of lists of "structural and functional problems" of the state. When they ultimately proclaim the "dialectics between reform and revolution," we have to state flat out that there is absolutely nothing revolutionary in modifying the state to improve its functioning, and nothing dialectical either. Neither the "dialectical" reforms nor the theory justifying them can ever help any proletarian. And finally, we know of no cabal of monopolists preventing the state from accomplishing its alleged mission, nor do we blame the "fiscal crisis of the state." It's simply that we do not know of any good deeds for the state to perform. Actually, there are none!

Thus our explanation is objective. We don't approach the theory of the state from ideals or morality, from what it is imagined states ought to be. We just say what the state is. There also exists a plethora of ideologies about the state, thinking derived from a false consciousness of political life, which takes certain aspects for granted. We relegate these to remarks at the end of each chapter. Also at the end of each chapter are to be found some brief historical remarks, which are intended only to dispel any lingering notion that anything fought for must be good. They are not intended to make the explanation of the state "historical," since it isn't.

One last introductory word. The term "bourgeois" is not used here to mean, "lacking in refinement or elegance." It refers only to the formation, or constitution of the dominant societies of the current epoch, in contrast with, say, the feudal epoch. Other terms used in a special sense are discussed in the text where they occur.




The Democratic State

A 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, which 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. Politicians, who like to fend off all criticism of the state by magnanimously rejecting all nonsense about making everyone equal, also cite it. 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".



















The Democratic State

A Critique of Bourgeois Sovereignty

Chapter 2


Sovereignty

The People

Constitutional Rights

Representation

The people's will for political rule is fulfilled by the sovereignty of the state. The power of the state originates with the people and complies with their political will by enforcing it, as the public interest, against all the private individuals. The constitution lays down the relations between citizens in the form of valid principles for the state's use of force. Constitutional rights define what citizens and the state is allowed to do, while professional representatives of the will of the people see to it that all the implied duties are performed. Bourgeois society maintains its conflicts by dividing its members into citizens with constitutional rights, on the one hand, and servants of the people obligated to use force, on the other.

a) A sovereign serving the public interest

The bourgeois state is sovereign, i.e., it is an independent body separate from its citizens and distinct from all their particular interests. It is a power acknowledged by all citizens solely because it enforces its own interest, the common good, against all the private individuals. By using its force to ensure that they use their particular economic resources only in accordance with its interest in person and property, the state serves those interests, which derive from the ownership of productive property. In substance then, this sovereignty turns out to be quite relative.

By acting without consideration for individuals and their property, the state ensures the functioning of property in general, a purpose that it can achieve only by being sovereign. Its sovereignty is maintained by the will of the people. It is just their common will for a state that makes the individuals of a society into a people, this will manifesting itself as approval of the state's decisions. The question of whether a state should exist in the first place is never a matter for free decision. Rather, this is decided by force. Everyone wants representatives, whether elected by the people or appointed by the state itself, and these representatives are expected to act sovereignly "in the name of the people."

b) Constitutional rights

As a maxim of state sovereignty, the state grants its private citizens protection against violent attacks from each other. Constitutional rights define the negative relation between competing individuals in the form of rights and duties toward the political power. Only to the extent that they assume duties toward the state does it grant them the right to be free private persons. The state is therefore a means for society, subjecting its citizens to its sovereignty and requiring them, by way of constitutional rights, to make use of their liberty while acknowledging the state. Constitutional rights formulate general restrictions. By giving permission to do all kinds of things, these rights inform citizens of everything they are not allowed to do, or of how the state is allowed to deal with them. In this manner each constitutional right simultaneously formulates its own conditions. Whoever makes use of a constitutional right must always expect the state to intervene, especially when this right concerns the relation between the state and its citizens.

The philosopher Hegel already knew that constitutional rights imply duties. He preferred to put it the other way around in order to celebrate the state, as if rights were some positive good different from duties. Rights are equal to duties, they are the same thing. By granting rights, the state is using its power to ensure that every relationship between citizens satisfies the principles of its rule, nothing more. Constitutional rights are also called human rights (to distinguish them from animal or plant rights) since they are thought to correspond to human nature. The "nature" that demands constitutional rights for humans is the world of competition, in which property does not leave much room for mutual respect. The positive determination of what is human, which the state bestows on everyone, has a purely negative content. The power of the state ensures competition and respect!

c) Representatives

When public servants, from the highest statesman to the lowest clerk, perform their duties, they represent alongside society the public interest that does not exist within society itself. They act for private citizens by taking action against them. In so doing, they display the heedlessness that goes hand in hand with their clear conscience. After all, they are executing the will of the people! To representatives of the people, the particular wishes of individual citizens can appear as unjustified hindrances, since the whole point of sovereignty is that the state achieves its own aims. On the other hand, it is not always a matter of course for the state representatives to fulfill their duties, since they too have individual interests and their offices present many a temptation. Collisions between the public interest and the private interests of state functionaries are inevitable. This is the reason for the corruption of public officials, who have the opportunity to misuse their positions of authority for themselves. This is also the reason why the state attempts to secure its servants from the hazards of competition, guaranteeing their careers and perquisites of office.

Those for whom serving the public has become second nature know that a critical attitude toward the state is incompatible with the proper performance of official duties. Public service is not just another job. To prove it, Germany, for example, maintains a blacklist for public service, while America stages the occasional witch-hunt.

d) Historical remarks

The struggle for the sovereign state involved ending the fusion of political power with the Church, nobility, and landed property in order to subject the entire society to its power. Its decisions were disengaged from all particular interests, including those outside its territory. The state was to be accountable only to its citizens, but to all of them, and vice versa. Thus freeing the old state from all its dependent relations fought the fight for recognition of person and property. In the name of the sovereignty of the people, all those parts of society not formerly recognized by the state demanded participation in the public power. All of the decision-making bodies of the state, unlike the old sovereigns, were to respect everyone under state rule by granting them constitutional rights. The old sovereigns were removed, and the declarations of the rights of man ushered in the execution of political power by representatives of the people. Those who had fought for their interests against the old state now became representatives of these interests. They no longer spoke and acted for the concerns of their people, but restricted them with all the means of statecraft. To those who had fought the battles, many a bourgeois revolutionary thus appeared a traitor after victory!

e) Ideologies

For the practical way of thinking of citizens, the inescapability of their submission to the sovereignty of the state is the starting point for all sorts of expectations and disappointments. They consider themselves to be constantly overburdened by duties, while everyone else gets to enjoy all the rights. Their representatives are now indecisively weak, now recklessly misusing their power. Citizens reconcile themselves to being bound by constitutional rights by forever haggling over the extent to which the state is entitled to restrain other people, who also make use of their constitutional rights. Their interest in state rule is often disappointed in areas such as these, which leads them to pass judgment on the leadership qualities and trustworthiness of their representatives. The demand for worthy representation is anything but rebellion, as can be seen whenever intellectuals criticize their leaders for lowbrow blunders. This demand goes along with the attitude that it is legitimate and understandable for representatives to use their power to increase their own prestige, as long as this serves the national interest. The public also accepts the brutality associated with the execution of political power with the help of the common saying that "politics is a dirty business." And as for worries about so-called scandals ruining the reputation of the state, they evaporate just as soon as the offending bad apples have been removed and replaced ("Watergate" not being the first nor last example.)

The propagandists of functioning rule, the political scientists, regard the relationship between the state and its citizens strictly from the point of view of whether it works. What they like about the sovereignty of the people is the economy of force, the stability of political power, which is based on consent. Their explanation of representation in terms of territory, population count and degree of political maturity is based on the ideal of a popular will which demands responsibility, both from the representatives of state power and from the citizens too. When political scientists extol constitutional rights, they never fail to make the transition from the wonderful possibility of being a free citizen to the necessity of using this freedom properly. Every elucidation of a constitutional right ends up balancing the extent to which people should be allowed to exploit the constitution for their own ends. On the other hand, the different ways that foreign states treat their citizens are explained simply by noting that they violate human rights. The "human rights weapon" was especially useful with respect to the former communist states, because it underscored in such a nice moral way the imperialist intention to eradicate this other form of rule. It is still brandished against the few holdouts, and for cleaning up the third world.

Leftist devotees of the true will of the people use the same weapon to strike enormously moral blows in the opposite direction. Year in and year out they demand more rights for workers and farmers, because they want them to have the pleasure of being totally at one with the power of the state. The trouble with the public power, as far as they are concerned, is that the pressure from Wall Street prevents it from genuinely representing the people. In the right hands, the state would finally meet its obligations to society.

Fascist critics also want a closer relationship between the people and their state. Instead of a sovereign power at the service of competition they want a sovereign that organizes competition as a service to the nation. They regard the state's recognition and regulation of the freedom of private interest as a sign of weakness. They consider constitutional rights to be fetters on the power of the state, instead of the means by which it achieves its purpose. In its representatives they see degenerate weaklings who oppose the true spirit of the people, just because democratic politicians make the citizens' will for a state the motor of their politics. That is, just because politicians take the exigencies of competition seriously, being the reasons why people want a state and the reasons for the state to exist in the first place. Fascists want private individuals to be exclusively citizens of the state!









































The Democratic State

A Critique of Bourgeois Sovereignty

Chapter 3



Law

Constitutional State

Democracy

By adopting a constitution, the state satisfies the interest of its citizens in competitive social relations and undertakes to do everything it does in the form of laws, which ensure that constitutional rights are enforced. The fact that the representatives of the people legitimate their action in terms of constitutional rights and correct their action when it conflicts with the constitution makes the state constitutional, the "rule of law." As such, it is emancipated from the influence of private interests on its actions, and is accountable only to the constitution in the exercise of its power. Democracy is the adequate form for the relation between the state and its people in so far as it realizes an abstract identity between popular will and state power, abstract because it does not depend on private individuals consenting to specific laws and their execution. For it is not consent that is required, but obedience. Should citizens cease being obedient, it will be the "rule of law" that is abandoned, not the state itself.

a) Why the bourgeois state is democratic

Democracy is the adequate form of state in that state power restricts freedom whenever the use of freedom infringes on the freedom of other citizens. Otherwise the state stands aside. It acknowledges the particularity of all private persons subjected to its law. It gives its laws generality, relates all actions to itself, and makes no special demands on any party, apart from the demand that everyone act in accordance with their own economic resources. (We will see in subsequent chapters how thoroughly it does this!) Unlike the absolutist state, it does not give preferential treatment to any estate or class. Rather, everyone enjoys all rights and nobody is privileged. It is not by being partial, by directly promoting the interests of certain parts of society, that the state serves one class. It is the law guaranteed to all, and justice, which result in the advantage of the stronger and the permanent disadvantage of those with fewer resources at their command. The democratic state trusts in the power of private property. It acts in accordance with existing social relations when it codifies them as law.

b) Constitutionality

Since its power originates in society, the constitutional state, which embodies the "rule of law," regards it as its duty to use power only in ways appropriate to the aims of its citizens. It performs this duty by making its own collisions with citizens conform to the criteria of constitutional rights. It generously contents it self with only those restrictions on citizens that are contained in the constitution. On the other hand, it is legitimate for the state to transgress these limits whenever its own existence is at stake. If it sees its sovereignty jeopardized by insubordination on the part of those who are continually and quite legally imposed upon, the democratic state permits itself to react to the violation of public duties by safeguarding the political order with no ifs, ands or buts. It will counter the threat to disregard its rules by accusing the "unruly elements" of misusing rights. So it protects these rights by consistently expanding them into emergency laws, the lawful preparation for the emergency when a state no longer wishes to bother being constitutional!

c) Democratic and fascist alternatives

The democratic form of state with all its highly praised forms of social intercourse is the institutionalization of the antagonisms between state and citizen. State power acts as an instrument for competing citizens by defining the limits on individual freedom. Private citizens are confronted with the abstraction of their own will as an outside force, which they must obey. Since they require this force to pursue their individual interest, but accept it only because of this interest, they are staunch democrats only when they themselves are not restricted by the activity of the state. They lose their democratic attitude when faced with someone who benefits from laws, which for them are only duties. Then they come up with better ideas about how the state ought to clamp down. In the middle of the finest democracy, "decent" citizens plead for "simpler" forms of political power, while an argument against rule itself is virtually never heard. State officials, on the other hand, come to realize that their service to the public interest hardly ever meets with approval. So it does not necessarily further their careers to go through with all the democratic procedures.
After a while in office they grow tired of democratically legitimating their actions toward their citizens and stop bothering to refer everything to the Bill of Rights. On fitting occasions, however, they do not forget to proclaim that they acquired their power democratically.

The abstract concept of democracy is also quite useful for explaining fascism. The wish for this alternative form of bourgeois rule is always present in a democracy, both by politicians and citizens. Its time comes when state and citizen, in opposition to each other, agree that all the difficulties of economic life stem from an inefficient exercise of power. The result is an unsqueamish use of political power that demands a willingness to make sacrifices exceeding the usual democratic standards, in order to do away with faultfinders, with citizens who are not willing to buckle down once and for all in political and economic matters. Anti-fascism as a program to save democracy has nothing with which to counter the political weapons of the fascists who are out to save the nation from noxious elements the other way around. There is the legend, which among leftists actually counts as the explanation of fascism, that an especially chauvinist part of the bourgeoisie seduced a people of noblest democratic instincts, but only because of the power structure in society. This is itself a piece of nationalistic reverence for a true democracy. To counter the fascist will of the people to sacrifice for the nation, such critics can pose nothing but a fictitious identity between the people and the state.

The transition to fascism does not at all contradict the statement that democracy is the adequate form of state under capitalism. Democracy can "function" as the institutionalization of the conflicts capitalist society only as long as citizens, legally bound to respect the exigencies of private property, compete properly. In other words, democracy is dependent upon the willingness to put up with the diverse results of competition. This is why people must be well prepared for democracy, and why certain populations are not considered mature enough for such a sophisticated form of state. At the same time, democrats are quite comfortable with fascist conditions, which they have created and continue to maintain in foreign lands. The art of self-control is part of democratic rule, its cardinal virtue. But the forms of poverty in the "third world" are no basis for such a virtue, once free will is allowed to assert itself there.

d) Attitudes toward democracy

The collisions between state and citizen, an inevitable consequence of their subjection to the law, lead citizens to complementary forms of approval and disapproval.

One can take part in democratic life by disapproving of actions of the state because one doubts their legitimacy. Here one will encounter other people who take a stand in favor of the same measures and stress their legitimacy. Approval and criticism will change sides depending on the nature of the law, which is in dispute.

Or one can make it one's concern to perfect democracy. One either invents a general crisis of legitimacy or demands more regard for citizens or more efforts to gain their consent; or one castigates the state for being too unsure of its existing legitimacy, for continually orienting its actions toward the approval of its citizens. In the former case one sees the threat coming from enemies of democracy, in the latter from enemies of the state. These "enemies of the state," not having such an easy time of it, keep insisting on their real desire for a state.

One can actually oppose the democratic state by denying its legitimacy. For the leftist revisionists of communism, the clear distribution of advantage and disadvantage among the population is a reason to suspect constant misuse of the people's consent to the state's sovereign law making. They therefore propose a state, which lets itself be guided by the "interests of the masses." Anarchists, by contrast, are satisfied with the discovery that the state uses violence against individuals. In the name of the people, they compete with the state by acting violently themselves, only to find the popular will quite in favor of the violence used by public institutions. Being separated from the masses, but not in the same way as the state functionaries, anarchists are hunted and victimized while the anti-terrorist squads become the heroes of democracy. To fascists, the legitimacy of the state is nothing but an encumbrance on the performance of its tasks. They demand from citizens not only unlimited consent, but also unconditional submission, that they give up every interest which limits the state. And politics should consist in relentlessly orienting the population toward the purpose of the state: terror in the name of the state.

e) Historical remarks

The emergence of democratic states is based on the fact that classes with opposing interests had one thing in common: both classes could use a state which forced respect for their own necessities. The unity between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat was a negative one - it was directed against a state, which made itself the instrument of an unproductive class. In America, which had no feudal past, a ruling authority was just created, more or less from scratch.

f) Ideologies

Extolling democracy has nothing to do with explaining it; people usually resort to citing advantages, which not many citizens can enjoy. And when it comes down to defending democracy, they are never squeamish. The easiest way to praise democracy is to "compare" it with conditions remote in time (all phases of human history!) or in space (Timbuktu!). And the easiest way to dismiss criticism is to point out those things could be a lot worse.

Serious comparison of bourgeois democracy with the preceding form of society reveals progress - recognition of (abstract) free will, abolition of relations of personal dependency, etc. - but also the force exerted on the great majority of free citizens. All liberties go only as far as the state allows, their restriction has been institutionalized; in fact they are only justified as long as they serve a purpose that has nothing to do with individual well-being. This is where people, especially journalists and revisionists inside and outside academia, start interpreting the mission of democracy. They like to jabber on and on about the ideal of democracy versus its reality, about "fighting for" democracy, about "extending" democracy...






































The Democratic State

A Critique of Bourgeois Sovereignty

Chapter 4

Justice

Protection of Person and Property

Morality

The state, as a legitimate power, subjects its citizens to the law. It enforces justice, thereby compelling its citizens to recognize each other’s free will. The administration of justice ensures the protection of person and property as well as the sovereignty of the state. It maintains competition by making the freedom of private individuals dependent upon the correspondence of their actions with the law. The state judges everything citizens do in terms of whether it conforms to the law, and makes its judgment valid by restoring the law whenever it is violated. In this way, through the power of the state, the law becomes immanent in the actions of citizens. Citizens in turn recognize the state's commands as ethical standards, which they apply, to themselves and to other citizens, which is what morality is.

a) Why the state provides equal protection

When it protects free citizens, their person and their property, by restricting them, the state is not just based on the collisions of competition. It is in fact the only purpose of the bourgeois state to preserve a society in which the augmentation of property, the expansion of the sphere of personal freedom, excludes all but the owners from participating in the wealth of society. By using its power to prevent any party from infringing upon persons and their property, the state ensures that the economic differences it is confronted with continue to exist. It thus also ensures that the conflicts of economic life will have their say, producing more or less guaranteed results.

Fanatics of equality will simply not believe that the equal treatment of competitors having different resources at their command is the best guarantee for the continual existence and even growth of their inequality. These people think of equality as an ideal with which to measure the differences in society, rather than as what it really is, a relationship of force.

b) Justice

Despite what idealists of equality think, the actual practice of the state is no injustice. It is just the normal state of law. By comparing the actions of private persons with the content of the law, the state ensures that individual freedom ends where property begins. There is thus an essential difference between a legal judgment and a scientific one. A scientific judgment is the theory about some object. It explains the object, capturing in thought what it really is. By contrast, a legal judgment has nothing in common with an explanation of the actions to which it pertains. Jurists are not concerned in the least with what justice is. They know that it exists in the form of laws, which are not the result of any scientific efforts, but of legislative fiats by the state. Their only concern is to see whether the actions of citizens conform to the laws or conflict with them. Their theoretical activity consists simply in bringing each "case" under the appropriate law as preparation for deciding the "case" in practice. Their judgments are not knowledge but comparisons. They abstract from the concrete content of the actions of citizens by relating them to laws, which are made objectively valid through forcible acts against the individuals. This is what police are for, and what the administration of justice is all about.

c) Subjection to law

By protecting person and property, the state secures a sphere of freedom for individuals, which sets limits on the pursuit of their particular interests. The exercise of one free will is dependent upon all the other free wills. Law therefore regulates it, the state dictating to citizens the forms their social relations must assume. The realization of their private interests is there right, i.e. it is permitted on the condition that it not violate the law.

The state applies its monopoly on force to ensure that the collisions between the interests in society occur without the use of force. The subjection of all activities to the law is the basis for the bourgeois definition of force as an unlawful act, which makes capitalist society appear rather idyllic to its many loyal supporters.
Bourgeois minds are so delighted about the state's monopoly of force that they easily forget that the validity of the law entails that all private acts involve submission to state power, so that an interest in freedom is simultaneously an interest in force.

1. In civil, or private law the state lays down how mutually dependent private persons are to relate to each other. The state sets norms for those activities in which private individuals avail themselves of their personal freedom and utilize their property.

In its legal definitions of natural and juridical persons, the state lays down the conditions under which someone is considered a legal subject and as such is allowed to perform legal acts, i.e., when and to what extent a person's will must be respected. Evidently, this is hardly a matter of course in bourgeois society.

In its laws on contracts and property, the state lays down different kinds of legal transactions, how they are to be carried out and their consequences. Since private citizens are only interested in their own advantage in their dealings, the state must impose on them the fundamental form of legal transactions, the contract, by most pedantically regulating all aspects of it. The law defines what is considered an act of volition, when an act of volition is valid, what this validity implies (performance) and how a promise to perform is to be kept. And since each party treats the other only as a means for gaining his or her own advantage, the state must also make sure its citizens do not make contracts about objects or services which are beyond their authority. By using force, the state brings home to them the exclusive nature of private property, which is desired and esteemed by everyone and therefore always disregarded.

In family law, the state lays down the relations of person and property when the relations between the sexes and between parent and child derange them.
Special regulations are necessary because the love between man, woman and child tends to get in the way of their duties as legal subjects. The state forces them to divide and share rights and duties in the very sphere in which they abandon mutual exclusion because of individual affection. The state thus declares the happy home a regulated utilitarian relationship, which is why the breach of the holy sacrament of marriage it not only a matter for the Final Judgment. It also has its mundane aspects, which are taken up in the family courts.

In inheritance law, the state lays down the relations of person and property resulting from the death of a property owner. It guarantees the continuing usefulness of property for the family and therefore limits the free disposition of private property by wills, which is already anticipated during a person's lifetime in diverse prohibitions.

2. In criminal law, the state lays down how the law must be restored when it has been violated, how it itself must react to acts which break the law. This is in contrast to civil law, which standardizes the state's definition of private claims with an aim to imposing law-abiding behavior, i.e., nothing is to happen unless it is permitted. Since the state's reaction to lawbreaking is also written into the law as the criminal code ("nullum crimen sine lege," no crime without a law for it,) the protection provided by law completely loses the idyllic appearance which comparisons to earlier "lawless" epochs help to maintain. Justice, the restoration of law, has nothing to do with a power arbitrarily responding to a private injury. It treats revenge, feuds, duels, etc., themselves as breaches of the law. Since the judicial point of view is not at all that of an aggrieved interest, but rather that of free will objectified in the state, the administration of justice maintains a society in which every individual acts in accordance with a principle, the principle of legality, which in itself recognizes and anticipates that there are always plenty of reasons to break the law.

The principle of guilt requires not only that wrongdoers be shown to have a free will (responsibility), but above all that they are aware that they are subject to the law they break (intent and negligence). Someone who obeys the law can only commit a crime.

This is why the punishment, which restores the law, is directed against the free will. It is force against person and property and is thus appropriate to the guilty party (confession, or "I deserve punishment"). Prevention and rehabilitation are secondary goals derived from the actual purpose of punishment, and reflect awareness that punishment has nothing to do with preventing crime, although this fact is of no interest to sociological-minded advocates of useful punishment.

When the measure of punishment is fixed by seemingly contradictory standards for different violations (e.g. white collar crimes versus robbery), this only goes to show that the state has a different interest in different offenses. And by making emotional impulse a mitigating circumstance when assessing how deliberate an action was, the law makes allowance for the sad reality of bourgeois society that quite a bit of will power is required to tolerate all the restrictions. This also explains why a calculating will, which is highly appreciated in other situations, counts as a base motive when it breaks the law.

3. The purpose of public or administrative law (as opposed to private law) is to regulate the state's subjection of citizens to the law created by ... the state! It is thus concerned with the constitutionality of the form and content of legislation, and the application of laws, dealing with such different spheres as legislative procedure, courts and police, taxes, science, etc. Here the state subjects itself in all its actions to its own law, judging itself as a legal subject when passing its laws (legislature), executing them (executive) and dispensing justice (judiciary). While the ideology of the separation of powers takes great pride in this ingenious system of mutual checks and balances on state powers, one can imagine how immensely useful it really is. (See Marx's, "The Constitution of the French Republic Adopted Nov. 4, 1848," which appeared in Notes to the People No. 7, June 14, 1851.)

d) Historical remarks

The legitimate power of the state, which citizens accept as restricting their interests, resulted historically from struggles against a sovereign whose power over society was not subordinated to the purposes of society. This in contrast to the constitutional state based on the rule of law.

Against a ruler whose word was law, the struggle was waged to universalize justice, to separate it from the ruler's own personal will. A fight aimed at committing the lawmakers to the will of the people, subjecting the government to the law and making the courts independent accompanied the demand for freedom and equality. Hence came the doctrine of the separation of powers.

In some countries the bourgeoisie fought this battle successfully. In Germany on the other hand, where a bourgeois state failed to establish itself, philosophers proclaimed its necessity in treatises on the ideals of this form of state. The philosophy and literature of the Enlightenment promoted the bourgeois state by deducing its moral principles, for example, in the practical philosophies of Kant and Fichte.

The emergence of American democracy differs from that of its European cousins. The seizure of the un-owned land brought with it free competition and the right of the stronger, forcing these competitors to establish a state. In this case, the state was the result of the actions of free property owners, who assigned sovereign rights to the state power only in so far as they seemed useful for competition. It was therefore, from the outset, solely a means of furthering the competitive interests of the people, the first democracy that even today shows its rough practices!

e) Morality

Citizens want the law for the sake of personal advantage, despite the fact that it also restricts them. To seek their advantage, then, they also have to want those restrictions imposed on them, and this is what morality is. Moral citizens justify their submission to a damaging power by citing the ideal of that power, adding their own private virtue to the force imposed on them. Thus, they not only abide by the law, they also have a righteous attitude, which allows them to endure their obedience. They measure all their actions against the ideal of righteousness, so that whenever they violate their duties in the pursuit of their advantage, they do so with a bad conscience. If repeated success leads them to forget to judge their actions as good or bad, other people's judgments will invariably remind them. Likewise, they themselves will serve as a bad conscience to other people, engaging in public hypocrisy.

This area of morality demonstrates remarkably well that the "Good" is a mere semblance, rendering its best services only when upheld as an ideal. Those who try to actually practice these ideals are therefore contemptuously called "idealists." Citizens allow their young ones a certain attachment to ideals. They can be sure that the hard world of work will transform any such "unrealistic" enthusiasm for ideals into the moral employment of these same ideals in the interest of personal gain. Adult moralism, on the other hand, is considered an annoying trait of character. Terming an adult an idealist therefore always means accusing him or her of being blind to reality or unable to cope, an accusation commonly directed to anyone wanting to make some changes, even before presenting any danger to society.

Morality is thus anything but a superfluous accessory to the bizarre spectacle of democratic life. It is the subjectivization of force accepted for the sake of success.
That is to say, morality is the force of law made into something subjective, the will of the state made into the will of the individual. It is the attitude one needs in order to cope with the forbearance that success requires. It may even last through long periods devoid of any personal advancement, proving true to its purpose both on the sunny side and on the bleak side of society. In the first case it is a welcome accessory to one's success. Successful people proclaim nonchalantly that they have higher aims, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. In the second case its popular forms offer consolation in the face of misery. In both cases the glorification of abstinence is itself abstinence as far as changing things is concerned.

It is therefore no surprise that, in the most modern of societies, the prevailing moralism is a hard nut to crack for radical critics. This moralism is not only a theoretical matter, a form of false consciousness. From the seamstress to the First Lady, people have an urge to practice the ideals of altruism, modesty, honesty, compassion, charity, etc. Everyone donates to the Cancer Fund, UNICEF and so on. People join associations which promote stupidity in young people, firmly believing that this is an opportunity to experience something workaday life denies them: community of purpose, solidarity, friendship. They compensate for the necessity to compete against each other by forming disgusting groups on the basis of their ideals, even if their idealism demands further sacrifices.

Religion ranks first in all this. Christianity was termed by Marx the religion that corresponds to capitalism. The cult of the abstract Christian individual puts into practice the conception of a God who is the supreme, almighty judge, to whom one owes practically everything but from whom one cannot expect any presents, except the gracious permission to be damned careful what one does, in view of one's original sin. Everybody sins, confesses remorsefully, and is modest enough to pose as the judge of other people's deeds. For an exposition of the duties, which a Christian free will demands, one can read Martin Luther's "The Freedom of a Christian" (Luther's Works American Edition volume 31.)

Even in this form of "spiritual submission" in the Community of Christ, there are some small differences, which cannot be overlooked. Some people preach and instill the required morality into others, which has become a genuine profession. Other people adopt this morality, their hypocrisy in the sphere of Christian standards being rather amateurish.

The Church does not limit itself to propagating morality as a theoretical matter, but turns its congregation's faith into the demand for worldly commitment, which has caused some people to leave the church. This loss of attractiveness of secularized faith is matched by the institution's meddling in public affairs in the manner of an interest group. The idealism of religion, practiced alongside the materialism of capitalist society, can live with this decline in religiousness. All the more so since the state has long since discovered the useful side of faith in the form of Christian nurses and chaplains in prisons, schools and the armed forces. In some countries the state even collects a church tax. As a byproduct, the zeal of Christian charity stirs up hatred for those who neither love animals, nor contribute to the continuation of bourgeois misery by making an additional sacrifice to the ones already demanded of citizens.

f) Ideologies

The logic of moral thinking is in keeping with the reason for morality, submission to the state as the price to pay for golden freedom. When citizens in basic agreement with the restrictions imposed by the state are out to gain some advantage at the expense of their fellow man, they will inevitably argue that it would be to the disadvantage of the losers to resist, and would also cause general harm in society. The normal form of disapproving what other people do differs considerably from a true critique, which would have to deal with the aims favored and prescribed by the state in this great society of ours. Normal disapproval is always directed against the freedom of other people, from the standpoint of wanting to take advantage of the existing power for oneself.

This is customary not only in the nasty little things people say to each other privately, but also in the public discussion of basic questions of "human society" and how things in general should be. A decent citizen's social theory shows strong tendencies toward a fascist condemnation of even the smallest liberties, which someone might take ("where would we end up if everyone did that!"). Revisionist moral philosophy has a slightly different way of dividing citizens and their actions into useful/good versus harmful/bad. The firm point of view of the masses that revisionists like to go by has nothing to do with Marx, although they cite him as their authority. Marx criticized capital and therefore the capitalists, so that he did not think of forming alliances with any of them, no matter how nice and small. Moreover, he did not consider the masses to be basically good but deprived of rights. Nor was financial capital unfair (a nice point of agreement with fascists!) along with all the other unpleasant things in life.

The moral criticism of society, which is summarized in the "Ideologies" section of each chapter of this book, is first-class nonsense when regarded logically, but it makes an immense contribution to orderly life in a democracy. This is noticed by "hippie" types in all countries, who cultivate, in an emphatically immoral way, the needs of the individual in opposition to their taming by bourgeois life. That these alternative ideas, especially regarding ecology and sexuality, are promptly assimilated into bourgeois society testifies to the tolerance of "our" public order. One is allowed to be a little unconventional, as long as it does not interfere with the course of capital and the affairs of state.

Needless to say, the historical forms by which the modern constitutional state was established are also found in the arsenal of stereotypes for paying critical homage to it. The French Revolution with its tremendous ideas, Kantian philosophy with its moral firmament, and the American Wild West are permanent props of modern morality.

























The Democratic State

A Critique of Bourgeois Sovereignty

Chapter 5

The Ideal Collective Capitalist

The Social State

By subjecting its citizens to the rule of law, the state forces them to maintain themselves as private proprietors, in competition with each other on the basis of the private property which they may or may not have. However, competition has adverse effects on competitors, which undermine their ability to continue, endangering the whole system of private property. The state therefore takes additional measures to ensure that individuals can indeed maintain themselves in accordance with their own resources. It performs compensatory activities in the interests of maintaining the system of private property, which means taking notice of the differences in property and cementing the differences which property creates, a class society. As the ideal collective capitalist the state provides the real capitalists, the owners of the means of production, with those necessary conditions for competition which are not reproduced in competition. As a social state with social services, it preserves the class of competitors with no property, so that it can continue being useful as a means for private property.

a) Money and the different sources of income

Securing private property is exactly the same as forcing each private individual to restrict himself to his own property in competition, leaving him dependent on the property owned by other individuals. In this situation, the individual's access to the wealth of society comes from taking advantage of the usefulness of whatever he can call his own. He hopes to effect an exchange by holding something hostage against the other people's needs. In order that resources as qualitatively different as land, capital and labor can be compared, the state guarantees a valid, objective standard, namely money, the means for social exchange. In this way the state ties all activities of its citizens to their disposal over money. Since everything can be had for money and only for money, nothing can ever be had except in exchange for money. The availability of this universal equivalent is a basic condition for competition, a condition that must be enforced by a power separate from all the competitors if it is to be truly universal and not subject to their conflicting interests.

Individuals thus have access to the wealth of society by using whatever resources they have to augment private property and thereby draw a corresponding income.
Since this is the way society's wealth is created and distributed, the state officially recognizes things as disparate as the productive use of land or capital and wage labor as equally valid ways of earning a living. When it sees that its citizens' incomes are constantly jeopardized by the effects of competition it takes measures to ensure that the various types of income are sufficient to permit the reproduction of each class. This can only be done by addressing the specific difficulties of those who own the means of production and those who do not. The former it helps by systematically removing the obstacles to accumulation created by their competition.
As to the other competitors, they get their income when they render their service to the owners of the wealth of society, and so secure for themselves the pleasures of freedom by giving it up. In this way everyone gets just what his or her resources can bring in. No wonder that meritocracy is held in such high esteem, when so many members of society have no property but themselves as a means of consumption.

b) What the state does for the owners of productive property

1. Since the use of productive property is based on trade between the owners of the various elements of production and includes transactions between producers and consumers, society is dependent upon the existence of material conditions of circulation. The state provides a functioning system of transportation and communication, which, being a general prerequisite for the augmentation of private property, also limits, this growth. Since these "infrastructural" facilities represent expenses to all private owners, interesting them only as a means for their individual wealth, they are organized in such a way as to minimize costs. The state, which values the principle of private gain, either compensates for the lacking profitability of such enterprises, which because of the size of the necessary capital outlays are organized as joint stock companies, or constructs and operates the highways, etc., directly. It supports productive property by spreading the infrastructural expenses uniformly over the whole of society by charging user fees or through its own deficit.

2. Once commodity trade is assured not only formally (by law) but also materially, entrepreneurs are able to draw revenue from their private ownership of the means of production only if they are able to produce their products at the least possible cost, since they are faced with a limited effective demand (competition). The amount of profits depends on the volume of sales. It therefore depends on the share of the market they can conquer with their products, and thus on the cheapness of their products. They strive to organize production so as to lower their unit production costs, since whether or not they can make a profit depends on technical progress in their application of labor and materials. The profitability of private property is based on the application of scientific knowledge, which entrepreneurs are not directly interested in working out, although they need it. Knowledge of the laws of nature has a bearing on their livelihood only in so far as it helps them to lower their production costs by providing special production methods or instruments. The organization of scientific research is an expensive matter, and does not provide the least guarantee that its results will actually be useful for the purpose of the enterprise. Nobody has the aim of finding out about nature, but everybody has a stake in the private utilization of such knowledge. Since knowledge is by its nature rather difficult to make into private property, the research of natural laws is not generally a profitable enterprise.

The social necessity of scientific research, which presents itself only as the desire to utilize it privately, forces the state to institutionalize a sphere of science separate from the material production process. By guaranteeing academic freedom, the detachment of scientific research from all particular interests, the state ensures the objectivity and unlimited development of this research, and therefore its usefulness for a mode of production dependent upon the control of nature.

Since the purpose of, and reason for, the institutionalization of scientific research is the subordination of society's knowledge to the interests of private property, the state also strives to have research conducted on technology, the practical applications of natural laws. In this way it allows for the private utilization of science.
However, whether or not it is actually used is subject to the criteria of profitability (see Capital I, pp. 392-93 and Capital III, p.262.) The state rewards efforts made and expenses incurred by private persons in the development of special methods of production by contract research, and by the right to temporary exclusive utilization. The patent, "intellectual property," as well as industrial espionage, are expressions of the contradiction involved in the private disposition of society's knowledge.

Citizens, who think highly of science as an indispensable means of progress, and who are continually informed in school and public life about the usefulness of its discoveries, are not only confronted with the many familiar practical devices testifying to the potency of science and technology. They also face the uselessness and even danger of science when it comes to solving those problems, which are created by bourgeois society. Since science actually is a means for the economic purposes of society, it is also held responsible for the positive and negative effects of its application. Since it serves society by formulating laws revealing what can be done with natural objects, and is thus the prerequisite for the most varied effects, it itself receives not only praise but also criticism.

Scientists themselves do not infrequently put this criticism forward. After all, it is their profession to serve society and the state with their science, to make themselves useful. So it is that certain "effects" of their efforts mobilize the citizen in them. Armed with their authority as scientists, they take a stand on political questions and criticize the statesmen for not making full use of the science and technology available. These are the technocrats who make suggestions on how to steer society more efficiently.

Or they attribute the negative effects of the capitalistic application of technology to the alleged "two sides" of nature itself, declaring the destruction of nature and people to be an inevitable by-product of progress. Therefore they conjure up the alternative of either carrying on the same way and using progress to heal the wounds it inflicts, or foregoing all comforts and restricting the national economy, which means above all that people must tighten their own belts. This is the alternative between propaganda for progress and ideas for saving energy in everyday life. One or the other ideology is publicly ventilated depending on the climate of the moment. For instance, consider the debate about atomic power, in which criticism of capital is virtually unheard of!

Some people attribute the negative effects of the capitalistic application of science to a deficiency of science, questioning the latter on philosophical and epistemological grounds. Or they make philosophical contributions to moral armament, preaching peace and humanitarianism and saying man is a speck of dust.

All these variations of false criticism of the state, society and science are based on an interest in having scientific knowledge utilized better for the purposes of this society, an interest which takes for granted that science must be subordinated to the principle of private property.

3. The industrial application of scientific and technological progress requires that it be mastered in practice by the wageworkers employed by the owners of productive property. The state sets up not only the institutions of research but also that of apprenticeship, and organizes courses of training for the abilities required by the various vocations. Since the usefulness of the proficiency made possible by the state is decided by the technical requirements imposed by the utilization of property, the training system promises neither those trained that they will be needed, nor capital that it will be able to use them productively. It is therefore not in the immediate interest of the owners of means of production to conduct education and training, whether general education at the elementary school level, more detailed knowledge at the secondary school level, or specialization at the university level. And this even though they greatly appreciate the results of the education process as a prerequisite for making profits. Businessmen regard the practical training necessary for specialized activities within their factory as a necessary evil today just as much as they did the training for limited activity within their factory at the dawn of industrial production. The state has to force them by law to provide it, which they proceeds to turn to their own advantage by exploiting their apprentices and by concluding contracts that tie the trainee to the company beyond the training period.

In the U.S.A. training in specialized technical knowledge takes place in trade schools run as private businesses with all the expected scandals of shoddy preparation, or in community colleges. The businessmen on principle refuse to involve themselves in the lengthy and formal training of their workforce, and nevertheless complain incessantly of its poor quality, even going so far as to blame it for their own problems in competition.

For citizens, who are interested in the benefits of education, the necessary discrepancies between the purpose and the means are constant cause for complaint about the poor organization of the public education system.