I The state is unnecessary

Must there be some single organization in a given territory that has a monopoly of legitimate force to deal with issues of common interest and assert the common interest over all more particular interests? Anarchists apart, all political thinkers in modern times have thought so. Marxists have seen the necessity of the state as historically provisional. Under socialism it will wither away. Other historically minded theorists have stressed that abstract conceptions of the state neglect the radical differences between political organizations in different epochs and circumstances. But most agree that there are sound arguments that show that in any large society a supreme authority is indispensable for the foreseeable future.

In spite of all efforts to sanctify or justify it the state remains a paradox, the great Leviathan that is meant to suppress violence by monopolizing it, the supreme constraint on our liberties that is meant to guarantee liberty, the provider of goods with an inexhaustible appetite for taxation. In its central function as the monopolist in the provision of peace and order the state is quite literally a protection racket. It insists that we buy its protection whether we want it or not. If we try to deal with another firm we are punished as rebels or traitors.

Moreover, the need for the sort of protection the state supplies takes the particular form that it does as a direct result of the system of states. It is because of the concentrations of power that states make possible that nothing less than the power of a state can protect us. We are so afraid of what states can do to people that we must have our own. Of course states provide many other public services besides defence and policing, and many of these are less spurious. But that it has fallen to the state to provide them is due almost wholly to the fact that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. There are alternatives. There can be legitimate authorities quite independently of the state, and it is possible for them to have adequate sanctions to ensure that they are obeyed.

Community

Even many anarchists agree that the only alternative to the state is community control,1 which is only possible in groups small enough for their members to share many common beliefs, and to have direct and many-sided relations among themselves, including many involving reciprocity, particularly mutual assistance but also retaliation. All societies need to 17enforce a variety of actions and abstentions from action. They must be able to do this by social pressure if they are to escape the need for a police force and a state. In a large anonymous community it is too easy to evade social pressure.

The argument is by no means decisive. I shall argue that the crucial problem is that of controlling not individuals but organizations. A multiplicity of authorities with specialized competences and activities could be co-ordinated without being subordinate to any single overarching authority. Basically they would co-ordinate their activities by negotiation among themselves. Of course such specialized authorities could come into conflict between themselves and there would need to be some body with authority to settle their differences authoritatively. But it is at least conceivable that such a body might have only an arbitrating function, with no right to dictate policy. Its only sanction might be that most individuals and organizations would accept its verdicts and enforce them against recalcitrants by peaceable means, boycotts, disobedience and moral pressures.

Such a state of affairs would presuppose that the society did not generate organizations with interests that were so wide ranging, self-contained and strong as to enable them to defy community sanctions. I shall argue that specialization of function could ensure that no large body of people had so strong an identification with any one organization as to regard it as representing uniquely their supreme interests. People would see themselves as belonging to a large number of overlapping communities, not to any single total community at any level. It will be part of my task to show how such a decentralization of power might be possible in societies of a very high degree of complexity.

In effect I shall argue that specialized organizations can themselves form communities of organizations, highly analogous to communities of individuals. Just as mutual interaction and interdependence against the background of shared beliefs and practices can produce a stable order among individuals and families, the same factors can discipline organizations, under certain conditions. Among those conditions are that no organization is self-sufficient, none is in a position to dictate to the others, and that each organization has a strong incentive to co-operate with others even where there is no immediate pay-off in doing so. Satisfying these conditions presupposes that there are effective barriers to individuals and groups getting control of enough organizations to subvert the patterns of mutual interdependence and turn them into largely one-way relations of power. I shall show how this is possible. Meanwhile let us take stock of the other arguments for the necessity of the state. 18

Violence

The first of these arguments is essentially Hobbesian. There is a tendency among human beings to settle their arguments by violence. The tendency for the use of violence to lead to further violence in a self-reinforcing process can be halted only by an authority powerful enough to suppress the use of violence by all others. The argument applies not only to individuals but to organizations, and so to states themselves. It need not rest on any claim that we have an innate disposition to violence. It is sufficient that from time to time we do use it, and that violence breeds violence. Ultimately world peace demands a world state, a supreme monopoly of effective legitimate violence.

In order to answer this argument we need to distinguish three main areas in which violence must be controlled. The first is that of violent crime, where individuals or small groups use violence for gain or personal satisfaction against other individuals and groups whose recognized rights they violate. This, I shall argue, can be handled in well-established ways, and the agencies needed for controlling it can themselves be controlled by demarchic institutions, especially if these agencies are relatively specialized or local. There will always be problems in this area, though some of the worst of them would be reduced if societies did not persist in attempting to control so much of people’s behaviour.

The second area is that of the use of violence for political ends against an established order. This kind of violence is rare and relatively easily controlled where the order is commonly accepted and just and its normal institutions function well. It should not be a problem in a demarchy, particularly because there would be no powerful state apparatus that the insurgents could hope to control or subvert.

The third is that of states themselves, or of groups acting with a state’s connivance, where there is no commonly recognized and enforced basis of justice between the contending parties. In “state of nature” situations of the kind envisaged by Hobbes even very small groups may be involved in violent conflict of this sort, and it may even be that the state was an historical necessity for humankind to get beyond certain historical situations. In its more primitive forms, however, radical conflict depended for its attractiveness not only on the absence of a law-enforcing state, but also on the simplicity of the productive relations and technology of hunter-gatherer and largely agricultural societies. One could simply kill, expel or enslave the conquered population and immediately set up in production on their territory. Under modern conditions effective conquest is a very much more complex and difficult business to carry through effectively and profitably. Keeping large subject populations in order is an expensive and not particularly cost-effective enterprise. Only the resources and organization of the state make it possible. 19Only “reasons of state”, and state aggrandizement and paranoia, make it attractive. Economically it is almost always cheaper to buy coal than to “mine it with bayonets”. The key to extirpating state violence is the abolition of the state as we know it.

There is no way of abolishing particular states without abolishing the system of states. As long as one national community confronts others that are organized as nation-states, it too must take the form of a nation-state. In particular, it must be prepared for war. There is at the present time no adequate guarantee of the security of any nation-state that is not prepared to defend itself by force. It has often been argued that, short of a world state, there cannot be. But that is false. What is required is not some higher body more powerful than any of its subordinates but the removal of causes of war and disarmament.

Short of that, a nation with a well-entrenched pattern of decentralized government might well be able to make the cost to a foreign power of attempting to take it over too high to be worth the effort. In the absence of any centralized chain of command there would be no point in attempting to use the existing machinery of government. An aggressor might, of course, succeed in taking control of some key facilities that were particularly significant to it but it is unlikely that it could secure the sort of co-operation in their own suppression that conquered states commonly extend to their conquerors.

At the same time other functions of states could be internationalized. There already are some international agencies that exercise considerable authority in specific areas.2 If we restrict ourselves to questions of abstract possibility there is little doubt that many functions of nation states could be transferred to such bodies, to the advantage of practically everybody affected. There is no compelling reason why all the functions of the nation state should not be dispersed to more limited agencies from the point of view of functional necessities, or even advantages.

Obviously, in practice the difficulties are insurmountable in the present state of the world. There is no adequate common political culture that could provide the basis for the authority of such bodies, except perhaps in those areas where such bodies as the international scientific community would be the main relevant constituency. The tendency of nation states is to stress and promote ideological differences between national groups. Even more importantly, the vast disparities of economic power between nations, the trap of underdevelopment and exploitation, have largely destroyed Marx’s vision of a genuinely and effectively international movement of the economically oppressed. Even where they do not actively support national chauvinism or imperialism, workers in advanced countries are desperately afraid of the effect of immigration and competition from their poorer counterparts 20in underdeveloped countries. They are determined not to abrogate any of the collective goods that the relatively high wealth of their communities guarantees to them. On the other hand, the poor nations fear that international agencies would work in favour of the rich and cling desperately to their mostly illusory political independence.

Nevertheless, if we are to take the measure of the problems that face human beings in general and the oppressed in particular, it is vital that we do not deny the existence of problems simply because they are at present intractable. At the worst it may be that only a global catastrophe, most probably a full-scale nuclear war, could change the situation and people’s perceptions of it so as to make a radical movement towards the abolition of states possible. At best, there might be a series of fairly specific crises that would lead to the formation of more international authorities leading up to the crucial step of disarmament and the gradual abandonment of the traditional conception of sovereignty. In either case progress is unlikely to be made unless there is a widespread conviction that the only satisfactory solutions are those that constitute advances towards whittling away the state.

It has not always been obvious to everybody that the recourse to violence to settle disputes is a bad thing. Willingness to risk one’s life to affirm what one believes in has often been seen as the supreme test for “manhood”, or even of spiritual worth. Wars have been seen as the indispensable solvents of rigid and anachronistic forms of life, the means of social change. They have been compared to the great storms that, as the metaphor would have it, purify the seas and lakes by destroying the polluted stagnation of peace. Only in ultimate conflict, it is alleged, can a whole people rise above its petty particular interests and assert a common and transcendent interest that is both nobler and more truly rational than any lesser good.

Such arguments are utterly specious. Wars are always waged for particular, and usually illusory, interests. It is a much greater and more difficult thing to work consistently and constructively for a common good than to risk one’s life for it. There is nothing inherently noble about risking death. People risk their lives every day for transient thrills. The element of truth in this romantic view of war is that one ought not to allow oneself to be coerced by the threat of force into abandoning something worth defending. But it is infinitely more desirable to find ways in which the threat of force can be eliminated. There may indeed be good reasons for using violence to overthrow oppressive regimes. But that necessity arises from the monopoly of power enjoyed by particular groups, not from the desirability of violence as such. The danger of rigidity and stagnation is a function of entrenched power, not of peace. There is no reason to believe that a decentralized society would not be one of rapid and healthy non-violent change. 21

Integration of the common good

The second argument for the necessity of the state questions this last assertion. It sees the common good as an integrated whole that can be achieved only by concerted and authoritative action planned and sanctioned by a very powerful central authority. This view is usually associated with “communism” or state socialism, but it clearly has conservative proponents as well. It emphasizes not so much the danger of particularist violence, as traditional liberals did, but the constructive task of building a genuinely common good. That good not only comprises an integrated set of material conditions in which individuals and groups can flourish but encourages and enforces specific social relationships and a subordination of the individual to the common good. This argument is not incompatible with many versions of the argument regarding violence but insists that violence is only a secondary aspect of the problem.

All that can come out of a decentralized polity, it insists, is a series of limited, ad hoc compromises between existing interests that leave the broader and deeper problems of social structure and relationships untouched. The historic roles of nations or classes cannot be reduced to piecemeal changes. The will of the people cannot be reduced to some simple function of particular interests or wills. It must be articulated and expressed in common action, leadership and organization, and expressed in common action, leadership and organization, through which people can recognize and respond to a vision and a reality that eludes more myopic views.3

It is possible, and, I believe, correct, to concede a good deal of force to the premisses of this argument. The common good is in many of its components something that can only be possessed collectively. It is like a game in which an individual participates but cannot play on her own. But common goods in this sense can exist without there being a single authority that is charged with producing them. Even where some specific common good needs an authority to organize it, or a variety of common goods must be co-ordinated, there is no compelling reason for such a task to fall to a state. Many of our most important cultural goods, our languages, arts and sciences, have been produced without the state playing any substantial constructive role in their production. Decentralized societies do not have to be individualistic or lacking in communal organizations and recognized authorities.

What is at issue is not the production of common goods but control over that production. That democratic control over the production of common goods is seen in terms of democratic control of the state is simply a result of the role that the state has made for itself. The state dominates the units that we call “peoples”, forcing homogeneity on its population through educational, legal and economic policies, integrating diverse goods into a single package. So 22“the people” come to be defined as the citizens of a nation state, and their interests as the totality of interests that the state can encompass. Granted this situation, realistic democrats recognize that a mass electorate can articulate an opinion only about the major direction of administration and legislation. So, if the people are to have a say through the electoral process on the major questions of government, they must exercise their power through a central authority that attempts to give specific expression to the will of the people through a host of co-ordinated decisions. The more control is centralized the more likely it is that a genuinely common interest transcending particular entrenched interests will prevail.

Some of the arguments against this view have become very familiar. A highly centralized administration can control a vast number of particular operations only through a bureaucracy that inserts many levels of decision-making between broad policy decisions at the top and final implementation at the bottom level. Bureaucracies tend to be rigid and have a high degree of inertia. They function on the basis of rules that are designed with more attention to ease of administration than to the substantive interests they are meant to serve. Diversity, experimentation, flexibility are sacrificed to uniformity, the avoidance of risk and predictability. The bureaucracy puts very tight limits on what its master can do. It controls the formulation of specific proposals. It controls the flow and form of information. It monopolizes expertise. The better it is at its tasks the more difficult it is to control, to change, to challenge.

These costs might be bearable if the bureaucracy did in fact achieve some desirable kind of rational co-ordination of public policy over a wide domain. But in fact the bureaucracies of various departments of government are often more concerned to prevent incursions of other departments into their domain than to co-operate with them. At the most particular level, a road being resurfaced seems to ensure that some other authority will dig it up next week to lay new cables or pipes. At the highest levels bureaucrats soon establish a symbiotic relationship with the particular interests they are supposed to control and devote themselves to the defence and advancement of those interests at the expense of conflicting interests.

No doubt a strong and determined government can bring a bureaucracy to heel, reorganize and redirect it. Revolution from above is possible at the cost of a great deal of authoritarian administration. But ultimately the effect of such methods is to transform the old bureaucracy into a new one that is vastly more powerful and rigid than its predecessor. Gentler and more gradualist uses of bureaucracy as a means of social transformation tend to produce precisely that piecemeal accommodation to particular interests that centralized power is supposed to avert. In a relatively free society it evokes 23a proliferation of organized interest groups that demand and get all sorts of concessions, subsidies and exceptions, often institutionalized in special agencies, that effectively nullify the sweep of general policy, especially where those groups have specific bases of economic, ideological or electoral power.

These counter-arguments to the centralization of power are, I believe, decisive if one sets a high value on democratically controlled social change. However, even the conservatives, valuing stability and continuity above innovation and experiment have reason to be disenchanted with bureaucracy. Its mechanical and instrumental rationality is hardly conducive to the flexibile, consensual ways of dealing with social problems that they wish to promote.4 They do not know how such an ideal is to be given concrete form in a very complex and unstable society. So they have proved very vulnerable to the so-called neo-conservatives who preach a fundamentalist version of classical liberalism.

Dividing the cake

The more fundamental counter to the argument that strong central authority is necessary to produce a coherent common good is to question its basic premisses and presuppositions. The idea that an unified social policy is desirable can rest on a variety of bases. One is that there is some good that is of such over-riding importance that it must be promoted or protected above every other and that only a supremely powerful organization can do this. At times this may be the case, but the assumption that there is such a good and that the state can protect it, or is the only way of protecting it, must always be subject to intense scrutiny. The state usually devours what it is supposed to protect. A slightly weaker form of this view is that there is a firm list of priorities that must be imposed on recalcitrant institutions, groups and individuals, and that a supreme authority is necessary to do so.

Against such assumptions I shall argue that there are ways of so governing specific functional institutions that they work directly for the common good without being subject to any higher government. The common good is an interrelated set of more specific goods that are not to be identified simply as the goods of particular individuals or groups. Rather they are the good functioning of a variety of institutions, practices and resources that interest many different individuals and groups in a variety of ways and degrees. What is important for each of these instrumentalities in terms of social co-ordination is that the other related institutions, practices and resources that it does not control function in ways that provide favourable conditions for its own functioning. The best way of achieving this is by direct negotiation between various specialized authorities directed to producing arrangements that are mutually advantageous. 24

Failing that, some form of arbitration between them should produce a more satisfactory solution than any persistent intervention from a higher level. If each of these bodies for producing some public good does its job qua producer of public goods in the light of the interests of those involved with that good, the result should be that the complex that is the common good will be better served than by any attempt to articulate it from above.

The crucial questions are, How can those who make the decisions in these specific agencies be in touch with the needs they are supposed to serve, and the relevant expertise about what is possible? How can they be encouraged adequately or, if need be, constrained to act in the interests of the public good? How can they be chosen and prevented from becoming entrenched? These are central questions that I believe I can answer. For the moment I ask that it be granted for the sake of argument that my answers are satisfactory.

One crucial question remains, however, namely that of adjudicating between conflicting claims to scarce resources. Let us ignore for a moment the question, Where do the resources come from? Still, dividing up the resources involves a very important degree of policy decision and control. Are we not left with something suspiciously like a state? Who pays the piper calls the tune. The allocation of resources is, in the short run at least, a zero-sum game. That does not mean that it must be run by a single authority. There could be a variety of bodies that allocate finance to various institutions and projects, each making its grants conditional on the receipt or non-receipt of grants from other sources. Such a system might be quite flexible and efficient if the membership of various granting bodies were competent and reliable. It could, I shall argue, even be democratic if the granting bodies were representative of the whole spectrum of interests in the community.5

Law

Even if it is the case that there is no compelling reason for material public goods to be produced or supervised by a central authority, the common good includes at least one vital element that appears necessarily to involve a central authority, namely law. Decentralized powers must be defined and machinery of arbitration set up. Bodies such as those we have been suggesting can only be stable and legitimate if constituted and supported by law. In very complex and artificial societies there are no “natural” authorities of the sort that there may be in simple or traditional societies. The scope, functions, entitlements and limits of specific authorities need constantly to be redefined in the light of changed circumstances. The scope and limits of entitlements, rights and duties of individuals must be spelled out so that people can know what they can and cannot do. The law must not only articulate what is valid or invalid, it must punish wrongs and protect those who are not able to protect themselves. 25Above all it must express a common conception of justice and seek to promote it.

Some kinds of dispute may be settled by recognized arbitrators without any explicit legislative or juridical system, but clearly many could not in any complex society. This is a point that I do not propose to deny. What I do deny is that it entails the sort of power that is given to modern states. There might be a plurality of law-making bodies for specific functional rather than geographical areas, a sort of federalism of function. In such a polity the role of any supreme legislature and supreme court might be quite limited, consisting for the most part of reviews of and appeals from laws and decisions of more specialized authorities, and readjustments to their jurisdictions and procedures, without any power to initiate judgement on substantive “first order” questions. Such executive functions as were necessary to carry out legal decisions might be exercised directly by the courts without any independent executive arm being necessary. Such an authority would rely on invoking community sanctions against recalcitrant authorities rather than exercising specific penal powers such as fines or imprisonment. It would rest its authority on the common recognition of its right to make these decisions and the importance and general acceptability of the decisions themselves.

No doubt a widely shared democratic political culture would be an indispensable condition of the operation of an institution such as I have sketched. Institutions and practices do not function automatically and without preconditions. Even in present states the effect of such a culture on the functioning of political institutions is not achieved primarily by force or the sanctions of electoral success and failure. It is to a very great extent a matter of what people are prepared to accept as right or at least reasonable. Even those who do not accept the substance of that culture are forced to give at least an hypocritical endorsement to its externals. I assume that the present aspirations for rational, just and responsive decision making in public affairs are capable of substantial development and that increasing the variety and specificity of the institutions in which public affairs are conducted would produce greater participation in and awareness of a shared political culture and in turn enrich that culture. I shall try to show in detail how this might be brought about.

II Why we should get rid of the state

In the preceding paragraphs I have been assuming that it is desirable to get rid of the state for two obvious reasons. The state is the means of war and of repression. Whether one adopts the view that human beings are naturally territorial and bellicose or naturally peaceable and reasonable the 26conclusion is the same. If they are bellicose it is folly to let modern weapons of destruction fall into their hands. If they are peaceable there is no good reason for running the risk of mistakes and accidents. In any case whatever innate dispositions people, or significant proportions of them, may have, these are heavily overlaid by training, repression and social organization. No matter how one attempts to romanticize violence, it is supreme folly to put ourselves in the hands of the few who, at the touch of a button, can unleash incalculable and irreversible destruction upon humankind.

Even apart from war and the threat of war, the repressive potential of the state is enormous and largely uncontrollable. This potential may not be apparent where the society is not under great strain or overt conflict. The capacity to escape such strains, however, is much more the exceptional case than the norm.

I shall return to this point later when various other economic and social theses have been argued.

Functions of the state

Meanwhile, let us look more closely at the functions of the modern state. The state exists to express and promote the unity of a given territorial community. Its monopoly of legitimate violence has been used to attempt to safeguard and promote a great variety of things that have been regarded as important to the community: its military power relative to other states, its religious and other culturally important beliefs, its internal law and order, its economic well-being and its prestige. It has an ideological function, a military one and an economic one. The history of the modern state system is a history of struggles about the exercise of these functions, various forces striving to maximize or minimize each or all of them or to produce decisive shifts in policy in each or all of them.

The net effect of these struggles has been a vast increase in the scope and efficacy of state operations and a marked change in their characteristic forms and modes. Even those who have been hostile to the state and to the particular socio-economic order that it buttresses have by and large succeeded only in extending the range or changing the mode of its operations. Some of the disabilities of the oppressed have been alleviated by social services of many kinds, at the cost of making the recipients clients of the state. Abuses have been controlled at the cost of proliferating agencies of state regulation. Greater economic stability has been achieved at the price of massive intervention by state agencies in the economy. In electoral regimes parties compete for votes by offering to use state power to the pretended advantage of various groups. Even the advocates of the minimal state succeed only in transferring the emphasis on welfare to an emphasis on armaments and 27“law and order”, strengthening one branch of the state at the expense of others and one segment of the community at the expense of others.

This enormously complicated organization is the site of a host of conflicts between fragmented interest groups. In Robert Dahl’s phrase, what we have is not majority rule or minority rule but minorities rule, according to the everchanging opportunities for diverse particular interests to gain some partial ascendancy over policy-making and its implementation in some specific areas. Within a limited perspective this sort of polyarchy, as Dahl aptly calls it, is on balance desirable. It mitigates the formal concentration of power and breaks down the tendency to bureaucratic inflexibility. Most groups get some relief from their most pressing problems. No group is in a decisive position on every issue. A certain sort of stability is achieved together with a significant degree of stability is achieved together with a significant degree of adaptability.

Such a view seems a far cry from Marx’s view expressed in the aphorism that “the executive of the modern state is the committee for handling the common affairs of the bourgeoisie”. Marx, of course, spoke only of the executive. He was aware that the state, even in his day, was much more than that. Contemporary Marxists have tried to cope with the problem of understanding the enormous qualitative and quantitative changes in the role of the state over the past hundred years or more.6 At a very high level of generality it is easy enough to keep the substance of Marx’s thesis intact. Modern states in the Western world, even when their governments profess some socialist ideology, all maintain the capitalist system, and at least to that extent the central common interests of the bourgeoisie. Moreover in economic matters they are tightly constrained to safeguard the central motor of capitalism, the accumulation of capital, and their policies in other areas are closely governed by this central requirement.

In most countries the central electoral issues are issues of “economic management”. Governments are made and unmade by perceptions of their success in administering the existing economic order. Attempts at even relatively modest change are rarely successful and produce great apprehension. The state is not a capitalist conspiracy, but it serves capital well. The commonly perceived alternative is state socialism and the evidence that that would be worse is generally regarded as overwhelming. Radical theorists may talk of various possibilities of socialism without the state, but there are no practical political programmes for achieving it, and its very possibility remains highly debatable. The capitalist state is generally accepted. It is no doubt a site of class struggle, but that struggle has rarely taken any radical orientation. It is not a struggle for a decisive socio-economic change but for small readjustments of policy that leave the system intact. 28

In the middle of the nineteenth century both conservatives and radicals thought that the advent of full adult suffrage would herald a decisive political class confrontation. The have-nots would dispossess the haves, the repressive apparatus of the state would be destroyed, and the dictatorship of the proletariat would inaugurate either a new tyranny or a new freedom in democracy. Five generations later these hopes and fears have been decisively disappointed. By and large the state is not perceived by the workers as the prime instrument of class oppression. For it is not, for the most part, overtly repressive.

The mode of state control has changed, as Foucault has emphasized, from overt show of force on sporadic occasions to a pervasive surveillance and regulation of vast areas of social life.7 As long as one goes about one’s ordinary occupations in the normal way one is hardly conscious of the state’s omnipresent regulation. Very often it appears as a protective shield, a big brother much more benign and permissive than Orwell’s fiction. In 1984 one cannot take 1984 very seriously most of the time, at least as it affects most people, in most democratic countries. The purported demonstration that the state is deeply oppressive seems excessively metaphysical. Protest pays. Even the most entrenched bureaucrats want to appear fair and compassionate. The police are brutal and arbitrary only with those who are marginal to the community and deviant from its broad consensus. That consensus changes to incorporate and domesticate even more of the rebellious.

Strains in the system

Nevertheless, the state system is under very strong internal strains. In the first place, in advanced countries the state has to appropriate rarely less than a third and sometimes more than half of the gross national product to meet its commitments. Taxation is inherently arbitrary in its incidence. Even those who accept a given scheme of taxation almost always feel entitled to avoid its imposts. When large sums are involved evasion becomes an industry and every economic and political activity is affected by it. It stifles, corrupts and constrains what people can do. Even where taxation is formally redistributive from rich to poor it normally ends up being redistributive in the other direction, if only because the rich have so many more ways of evasion open to them and can afford the best advice on how to use them. The self-employed gain at the expense of the wage and salary earner, the unproductive speculator at the expense of the regular producer. Conversely, those who receive benefits from the state are placed under strong temptations to fake the bases of entitlement. Both tendencies can be countered only by even more detailed regulation and surveillance. Is there no better way of providing for public goods and for those in need of assistance? 29

In the second place, there is an insidious tyranny of numbers. The state homogenizes and atomizes social relationships. The horizons and expectations of people contract to the limits of those variations that the system constitutes as practical possibilities. Even where people are vaguely aware that things could be otherwise they often cling to the devil they know and find virtue in doing so. They settle for quiet passivity, shunning risk, experiment, confrontation and uncertainty. As the neo-conservatives have emphasized, they lose their resilience and initiative. Lacking something significant and constructive to do in public life they shrink into a private life that is increasingly trivial and boring. At worst they take to drugs, crime, charlatan religions and cynicism. The political culture on which the system depends is profoundly threatened.

Thirdly, nation states under internal strains have always tended to seek to overcome these strains by uniting the nation to respond to some real or contrived external threat. Threats lead to counter-threats and eventually to war, as the Falkland-Malvinas episode so recently reminded us.

Short of war, “security” systems consistently increase the role of military and police power in society. Almost everywhere the military establishment is closely integrated with those forces in society that seek to maintain existing stratification and privileges, restrict information and debate and weaken the power of popular organizations of all sorts, especially trade unions and radical political groups. Most countries live under some degree of threat that the response to any significant shift of power away from the existing establishment will be military intervention, often direct military dictatorship. In any unstable situation the military are vastly better organized and better equipped to take the initiative effectively than any insurgent group can hope to be. Conversely, the greater the likelihood of confrontation with the military, the more any realistic radical group is likely to see itself forced to organize itself on military lines. The result is that even if it attains power it is likely to be as authoritarian and ultimately as reactionary in many respects as its opponents.

Fourthly, the military in most countries depend to some very significant degree on one or other of the superpowers for “aid” in hardware, training and other support. They become pawns in the cold war, guardians of various forms of neo-colonialism. Poor nations devote scarce resources to armaments and economically and socially destructive organizations. Rich nations devote the little aid they are prepared to give to the poor mostly to military or paramilitary projects.

No doubt in a more fundamental analysis of the role of the state, the military would appear as secondary to basic economic and ideological forces. Nevertheless those forces could not operate or maintain themselves without 30the military and the state apparatus which in a crisis is always prepared to submit to military directions. The practical salience of military power is all but complete. A democratic state is a dialectical contradiction. The more powerful the state the less are people able to control it. The weaker the state the more power non-state elites enjoy. A state may, of course, in certain respects and under certain conditions, be more or less democratic, but only in conflict with its own inherent tendencies. The democratic state is an exceptional and unstable compromise. It is time to explore more deeply why this must be so.

III Democracy versus the state

In the liberal tradition there has always been a tension between a specific democratic ideal, the rule of the majority, and the view that the role of the state should be minimized in the interests of individual freedom. The freedom that was uppermost in the minds of the classical Anglo-American liberals was the freedom of the property-owning classes to dispose of their property as they saw fit. They feared that an envious propertyless majority would use their power to dispossess the rich and so ruin all classes. But there were other aspects as well.8 Freedom of thought and expression, freedom of religion and freedom of association and movement were also important. A populist majority might be as intolerant as any absolute monarch.

The constitutional state

Their perceived solution to the problem was the constitutional state which had only those limited powers assigned to it in the constitution, or was expressly forbidden by the constitution from using its powers in certain specific ways. The guarantee of the constitution was the separation of powers, designed in such a way that each of the major functions of government kept a check on the others. Let us leave aside for the moment the inadequacies and dangers of this system and concentrate on the conception of democracy that came to be associated with it.

The dominant theme was that a democratic government was a minimal government. The liberal property-owner’s state could correspond to the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people precisely because the people wanted to be governed as little as possible. Their greatest interest was to maximize their freedom. This in turn presupposed a society in which the provision of goods by the state was unnecessary because people were in a position to provide for themselves, apart from the basic goods of law, defence and a minimal infrastructure of facilities such as lighthouses. People would see any unnecessary increase in state power as a threat to their freedom. The will of the people was not to rule for fear of being ruled. An inherent 31contradiction between the state and democracy was tacitly acknowledged, but in the limited and unsatisfactory form.

The transition from the classical liberal to the liberal democratic state rested on a change in its view of who constituted the people. As C. B. Macpherson has emphasized, for the liberals it did not originally mean the whole population of the territory of the state, but rather the responsible members of society, in practice owners of substantial property, generally excluding not only women, staves, foreigners and criminals, but the vast majority whose only property was their own labour power. Sometimes these, as servants, were deemed to be represented by their masters. In any case they were seen as lacking experience, education, good judgement and a stake in the economic system. Not being free in their daily occupations they were in no position to understand and defend freedom.

It is easy to dismiss this conception of the people, as a self-serving ideology promoted in the name of freedom by the rising bourgeoisie, deriving its emotive force from its rejection of feudal privilege, but consecrating a new set of forms of exploitation. In many respects, however, it was both more honest and more realistic than the populist democracy to which it succumbed. It recognized that the state in fact functions to defend the existing social order, and that only those who have good reasons to support that order can be expected to make sound decisions about state policy. It aspired towards a rational administration of an actually functioning society rather than towards some illusory ideal. It realized clearly that the rule of the majority of inhabitants was not, at least in class societies, compatible with the stability of the state. Not just anything the majority may choose is politically possible. There can be a stable state only when there is basic harmony between the requirements of social and economic stability and the political power structure. Otherwise the state must either stand as a superior power above society and inevitably slide into tyranny or become the instrument of conflicting social forces. The normal result of the latter is a state of political chaos that also ends in tyranny.

Constricting the political agenda

The crucial way in which the system is safeguarded from fickle majorities is by narrowing the political agenda. If this has the happy result of preventing the state being used for some purposes in which its use is dangerous, it certainly does not prevent all such uses. More importantly for our present purpose, the fact that many urgent problems are distorted or not recognized as open to constructive solution is not just an effect of reactionary political tactics. It is endemic in the constitutional solution to the problem of tyranny. In the first place, the constitutional state remains a state. It cannot be an effective means of calling in question the consequences of the system of 32states. While nearly everybody would place the abolition of the arms race very high on their list of desiderata, the popular will for peace is almost wholly ineffectual. The state system cannot articulate such basic and pervasive needs realistically. It is nonsense to talk of rule by the people when such questions cannot even get on to the political agenda.

Narrowly constricting the political agenda is an inevitable effect of constitutional government designed both to maintain and restrict the power of the state. One cannot exclude political tyranny without firmly entrenching institutions and practices that have a narrowly circumscribed scope and efficacy and a political culture that confines the tactics and issues of politics in the spirit of the constitution. It must become accepted that what is politically possible is limited and that it is right that these limits be observed. The fact that constitutional politics cannot deal with those issues that bring into question the state system itself is not the only result. A host of other issues of vital importance are either effectively excluded from the horizon of practical politics or posed in a form that excludes awareness of appropriate solutions.

Fission suppressed

The most obvious rigidity is that states do not tolerate secession of any substantial part of their population. The very arbitrariness and precariousness of the boundaries of most states is the most powerful reason for their not being open to legitimate challenge. Once they are changed there is no particular natural limit to change. Conversely, states through a host of legal and “educational” activities strive to suppress the cultural and economic bases of the distinct identity of lesser communities in an attempt to preserve the state’s unity. The processes of free formation of communities are deliberately and effectively curtailed. The results are particularly damaging in places such as Africa where tribal and other community forms of development are still alive. As Michael Taylor emphasizes, fission has always been the normal means of evading internal conflict in communities. Deprived of this normal recourse communities that wish to resist absorption into the dominant state culture are repressed.

Paradoxically this repression is often hailed as a liberation. The old particular cultures are seen as outmoded and constricting, and their replacement by modern cultures is progress. Formally, of course, this is a liberation. The power of communities other than the state to exercise authority over their members is destroyed. It remains a very complex question whether freedom in one respect is not bought at the price of worse enslavement in another. Obviously many people affected by such changes feel that it is. The balance sheet for every community and every individual will be different. What is of more concern to us at present is whether or not 33non-state communities could tackle the sort of problems that arise when the material and technological bases of life are transformed to exploit modern scientific knowledge. The argument of this book is that they can, provided they are not total communities but overlap with a variety of other specialized communities in an open pattern.

If that is correct then the rigidity of the state system must be measured not only against all the destruction of minorities and their cultures for which it has been responsible but against the possibilities of a much more fluid and diverse political order that it excludes.

Collective property

The state is the supreme property-owner, enjoying the right of overriding all private property rights within its territory by resumption for public use, taxation, or punitive confiscation. It is only the law of the state that fixes determinate titles to property and what those titles entail in the enforceable exclusions of others. The state excludes itself from interfering with property only for reasons of prudence. One reason it cannot brook secession is that those seceding take with them part of its property.

Even more severely than any historical form of private property, state rights to property are sources of absolute exclusion of any responsibility to others. So the only ways in which other communities can obtain what they want from a state are by force, trade or appeals to pity. The poor communities remain poor because they lack resources with which to trade and force with which to threaten. The pity of the rich nations is miniscule.

If certain activities are to take place on a piece of land others must be excluded, at least temporarily. The farmer must exclude animals from grazing on the growing crop. But there can be a multiplicity of kinds of right to the exclusive use of land in particular ways under specific safeguards and for legitimate purposes. Various kinds of rights can belong to specific sorts of individuals and organizations. Assigning those rights need not rest on any overriding right, but simply on the authority to adjudicate conflicting claims.

What the state’s supreme property rights express is an incoherent recognition that there is no natural claimant to the earth other than the whole community. Humankind, however, has no political existence. So each state acts in effect as if it were itself the whole, thus denying the rights of humankind as a whole. Once again it is easy to conclude that the problem can be solved only by the emergence of a world state that does represent all humankind. I am maintaining the contrary. Every all-embracing claim must be abolished and the system of entitlements changed to represent the real interest of the various overlapping communities that constitute the whole. Some of the initial moves in this reconstruction of property rights will involve 34the use of state power, but I hope to show how it need not depend on state power once it is launched.

Migration and population

One of the boasts of the liberal state is that, unlike most other states, it does not try to stop individuals and small groups leaving it. It does, however, impose severe restrictions on people joining it. Unquestionably, whom to exclude from group membership is one of the most difficult problems that any group has to solve. No group can absorb more members indefinitely without losing its original character, and having very different effects on its own members and on other groups. No group can fall below a certain size and still be viable. Nevertheless, where voluntary groups are concerned, we commonly uphold the freedom of people to leave them, much as we may regret the demise of the group. But joining is another matter. It is difficult to see precisely why this should be so. Clearly a group is entitled to set a fair price on the benefits that it provides for new entrants from the accumulated efforts of past members. Indeed, where the benefits are wholly the product of the members and impose no costs on others there is no compelling reason why the group may not exclude whom it likes and impose what price it likes on membership.

However, the most significant voluntary organizations do affect non-members’ opportunities quite substantially. In some cases they have an effective monopoly of certain opportunities. A sporting club may for a variety of reasons have a monopoly on facilities for a particular sport in an area, a cultural club may have exclusive use of the facilities necessary for staging plays and concerts and so on. Where such monopolies exist it seems reasonable that clubs be required to admit appropriate applicants, at least up to the number at which it might reasonably be split into two viable clubs. But who is to lay down such requirements, on what authority and on what criteria?

There is a series of dilemmas that arise in any attempt to make such judgements. On the one hand, the group of voluntary associates ought to be able to determine their own way of doing things, the size of their membership and the rhythm of change in response to changing circumstances. Not only the liberty of the individuals but the diversity and spontaneity of social relations is at stake. From these points of view control is counterproductive. On the other hand, the strategic or monopoly power of voluntary organizations can be used to discriminate against people arbitrarily, and to enforce restrictive practices to the detriment not only of excluded individuals but of a range of social relationships. So we have various forms of anti-discrimination legislation. As we expand the scope and importance of the associations the problem becomes more acute. 35

In general, as I have suggested, and will argue more fully later, monopolies of material resources necessary for a particular activity should not be allowed to become a source of power for those who control or use them. The use of such resources should be subject to conditions that preserve the community interest. If one carries through that principle to the international situation then it seems that no nation should be permitted to have exclusive power over its own territory, but should enjoy it only subject to conditions that preserve the interests of other nations and their members. The nation itself should not have unqualified rights to exclude immigrants any more than to impose just any restrictions it likes on the sort of communities that are formed within its borders.

On the one hand, it is utterly unreasonable to expect any community or association or nation to maintain the sort of open door policy that can lead to its being destroyed in the way that the American Indian and Australian aboriginal communities were. Quite apart from the killing, plunder and treachery so conspicuous in those cases, the mere fact of overwhelming numbers of people, given to utterly new ways of social interaction, entering the territory in which a community lives can make it impossible to continue in the old ways or even to adapt constructively to the new circumstances. Communities of all sorts need time and elbow room if they are to preserve anything worthwhile through cultural and social change. It is not only in their interests but in the common interest that they be given the chance of dealing with external forces rather than being simply overwhelmed by them. On the other hand, the rigid demarcations that allow privilege to entrench itself are not in the long term interests of anybody or any community, at least once one discounts all claims to religious or cultural absolutes.

The state system, however, is just such a rigidly entrenched way of preventing free interchange of members between communities. The interests of a certain established community and power structure are preserved without regard to the needs of outsiders or the desirability of change within the nation.

Nations, states and community

A pure market system of relationships and a purely organizational system both put a premium on efficiency over other values. “Instrumental rationality” is destructive of community. Flexible reciprocity, giving in the hope that one may get a similar service back from somebody else when one needs it, does not stand up in the context of strict contracts. Where each person looks after only his or her own interests and purposes, community norms and values wither. Where cash payments for specified tasks are the only basis of exchange the many-sided relationships that constitute communities wither. The nuclear family may succeed in insulating itself from these pressures because of the enormous internal pressures in favour of reciprocity that it 36generates. Small groups of families may extend some familial relations into areas of obvious mutual interest. Areas of civility may survive in more casual personal relationships, but community does not.

In these circumstances the crumbling identity of the nation finds expression only in the state and in a nostalgia that is wrongly called tradition. The nation not only attempts to use the state to assert its own reality and importance but strives to preserve itself by suppressing the very sources of internal variety and initiative that might give it life. The nation and non-formal communities more generally can maintain their identity through change only by adapting to meet the problems that threaten them. In general, in a complex world of increasingly specialized and differentiated activities no such open and flexible community can be a total community or be identified with a formal organization. It will destroy itself in the attempt, as so many nations have done.

At first sight the state represents the supreme example of reciprocity. It calls on its members to risk their lives for the nation, it preaches and (selectively) enforces a public morality of duty, service and altruism. But voluntary service is replaced by conscription, moral sanctions by law, and public service by professional careerism. The flexible, evolving common good of the nation is replaced by the goods that the state is designed to produce and regulate. Nationalism becoming statism ensures the death of those relationships that constituted the nation as a community and not just as an organization. The state, of course, has to keep alive the myth of the nation-state to justify its pretensions. People need to believe the myth because they have no come to accept their citizenship as their basic identity. Nationalism has become our public religion, displacing traditional religion into private life. But this myth is not a rational replacement for non-rational beliefs and practices. It is a mystification, a tragic and dangerous illusion.

The need for an alternative

The most common complaint against contemporary liberal democracies is the remoteness of the decision-makers from those affected by decisions. Those affected have little say in those decisions unless they happen to be in a position to bring organized pressure on the decision-makers, and the ability to bring such pressure is very unequally distributed, usually in favour of groups that are already highly advantaged in their socio-economic power. But the present complaint is more fundamental. It concerns not only the existence of great inequalities in the distribution of power, but the incapacity of most people to do anything towards righting them. The result is a disillusionment with liberal politics among substantial groups in the community that threatens the political culture itself. A democracy that renders people impotent is no democracy. 37

It is not surprising, therefore, that realistic radicals have generally seen reformism as the enemy of any desirable attack on the problems generated by existing power relationships. If the people are to exercise power to change the system all constitutional limits on the exercise of power must be overthrown. But these very realists become utterly unrealistic when they are called on to answer how a popular or proletarian dictatorship is to be prevented from turning into the dictatorship of a small political elite. Even if we grant that the people can articulate what it finds objectionable in present practices and policies and the general direction in which they must be changed, it cannot articulate the concrete means by which changes are to be implemented. It is the particular things that are in fact done that have effects. The more these things are done through the exercise of state power by a small executive the more dangerous they are likely to be.

It is not just a question of the opportunity offered to the power hungry to pay lip-service to popular demands while entrenching repression, important though that is. It is not only that radical change must involve conflicts to which there is no right answer or that all specific conflicts become conflated with the basic conflict of “the people” against its enemies. In practice the executive has to demand and enforce on the people the sort of discipline that a general must demand of an army once battle is joined. Since this demand itself creates new enemies the battle is never over, and the people have no more control over their leaders than privates have over generals.

The attempt to give more power to the people ends in tyranny over the people just as the attempt to exclude tyranny keeps the people from exercising power in the things that matter most. Neither the constitutional state nor the unlimited state can be controlled effectively by the people. Neither can do very much to improve the provision of public goods without increasing either the scope and rigidity of the state apparatus, or its arbitrariness and lack of accountability. Neither can be a means of calling into question the state system itself. Neither can offer satisfactory ways of dealing with the most pervasive social and economic problems. The question, Is democracy possible? is at least partially reducible to the question, Is it possible to provide for public and common needs by other institutions and practices than those of the state? If we are serious about answering this question it is not sufficient to point out the abstract possibility of alternatives to the state. We must give solid grounds for thinking that they could function effectively under realistic conditions. 38