Date: Mon, 26 Aug 1996 20:41:03 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: More on Mullen


On 26 Aug 1996, jc mullen wrote:

> Fame at last, I never expected to se my name in the subject area of a posting!
> 	Mr. Sciabarra says that Marxist tend to emphasize economic and social
> engines, whereas libertarians emphasize the state. This is true both for
> pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist libertarians. The big question (and I think
> ideological battle is just fine, preferably in a comradely style) is "Where does
> the state come fromand what is it for?". For revolutionary socialists, the State
> is a necessary and inevitable outcome of the division of society into classes.
> It comes into being at a certain moment in history, plays a specific role.

I am going to be predictably heretical about the state. I am a
revolutionary socialist, and I think that Marx and Engel's notion that the
state will wither away with the end of class divisions is dangerous
hogwash, for reasons that also underscore why anarchocapitalist ideals of
a society of pure market relations without a state are also foolish. (I
suspect that Chris is not that sort of anatchocapitalist, but a more or
less classical libertarian who believes in a minimal nightwatchman
state--jets and jails, as an old teacher of mine once put it. There are
different problems, justice aside, with that conception.)

The classical Marxist picture is hogwash in part for some of the reasons
that I gave a litt;e while ago about why bureaucracy is ineliminable in a
large, complex, pluralistic society. Collective decisions have to be made;
we need a mechanism to make them; in a large society it has to be
representative, specialized, and in fact bureaucratic. Its decisions have
to be enforced, so it requires a mechanism of coercion, a body of armed
men and women who can make the cololective decisions arrived at by the
representatives and acrried out by the specialists and bureaucrats stick.
These are not facts about class. They are functions of size, modern
technology, pluralism, and complexity. They may tend to generate facts
about something like class--I think this is Chris; worry and it should be
ours. But there's no dodging these facts.

Marx and Engels seemed to have supposed, despite Marx's qualifications
when he was being careful to the effect that non-class antogonisms woiuld
survive a socialist revolution that abolished class (private ownership of
productive assets, as he he saw they key to the "last antagonistic formof
society"), that when class was abolished there would develop somehow
enough social homogeneity and mutual solidarity that coercive enforcment
of common decisions would be unnecessary and that there wpuld be enough
increase in general skill and knowledge and enough simplification of the
tasks of social adminidstration that the administration pf men could be
replaced by the administration of thing (Engels). 

The first idea is curiously naive and actually rather unattractive, if you
think it through; it derives from Marx's streak of anticapitalkist
romanticism that he gets from Rousseau, and if you look at Rousseau you
see the conditions for taht society envisaged clearly enough to see two
things. First, it cannot be a large industrial society: R was clear and
correct atht it would have to be a small, homogeneous, agrarian society
where everyone could know everyone else, no larger than a city state.

Second, taht sort of homogebeity is unattractive on Marx's own terms: Marx
also has a streak of indivisualist artistic Bohemian romanticism in hom,
in which his vision of Communism is taht each does as he pleases, hunt in
the morning, fish in the afternoon, etc (The German Ideology). Well, R's
profound exploratioon of the idea of the General Will put the damper on
that: to maintain the kind of homogeneity necesasry to keep a small
society going you need a degree of crushing conformity and lack of
individuial diversity taht is really quite scary. R, relentlessly
realistic and pessimistic, thought you'd need fairly severe ideological
repression, backed by the death penalty, even in a small undifferentiated
society. Suppose he was wrong about that. The conformity might be enforced
socially, without the police, as in Toqueville's frightening picture of
precapitalist America: "I know of no other country where there so little
freedom of thoughyt," the old reactionary said. 

The point is: if you want pluralism, diversity, individualism, you have to
have enough lack of homogeneity so taht a society cannot operate on social
pressure alone; if you ahve a society taht's large and complex enough in
terms of geographic dispersion and division of labor (technical, not
social), you will have that sort of pluralism and heterogenety where you
like it or not. The upshot is the curious irony: freedom requires law, the
state, the police. 

Marx and Engels' idaes are dangeroud hogwash because if you try to
implement the ronatic anticapitalist ideal in a moderrn society, if you
try to bring the state, alw,a nd politics toa n end, you will destroy
freedom and diversity. Either you will do it by destroying the modern
character of the society and returning it to a Rousseauean idyll--in some
sense this waht Pol Pot tried in a twisted way, but suppose it happened
"nicely." You would still end up with soul-destroying conformity. (Also
militaristic competition among the city-states, as Rousseau, clear eyed as
always, saw well enough). Or you will do it by treating pluralism and
hetereogeneity, inevitable within a modern society, as something to be
squelched, and then you end up with the Terror: see Hegel on the French
revolution, still our besta ccount of the logic of Terrors from 1791 to
1937. 

Since I mention Hegel, I will say that he, deeply influenced by Rousseau
too, by the way--Marx gets a lot of his Rousseaueanism from GWF, was a lot
better on the conditions of freedom amnd the need for a law-governed state
ib a modern pluralistic socierty than Marx. H wanted a version of
Rousseau's General Will that he called Sittlichkeit, roughly a sense of
community, that would operate in a pluralistic society where
representation, specialization, and coercion to enforce the law were
inevitable. The theory is quite complex and can't be taken just as H sets
it out, since his conception of the social structure ofa  modern society
aws off, necessarily so, given his historical limitations; ina ddition H
had to express a reverence for monarchy taht makes no sense in his own
terms to keep his job. But it's there that Marxists might start to look,
rather than to Marx's own idle and fatal draems about a society without a
state.

--Justin 




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