This
essay is taken from Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for
a Decentralist Future by Kirkpatrick Sale, published this
month.
Historically there have been four general arguments for the
necessity of the state:
1. To provide
defense in case of attack and to guarantee peace and security.
2. To provide
economic regulation and development.
3. To provide
public services beyond the competence of the community and the individual.
4. To assure
social justice and protect the rights of the individual.
These arguments have a persuasive feel to them—they should,
they’ve been drummed into us for centuries—but it is fair to ask: do they stand
up? are they sufficient justifications for the existence of the state?
DEFENSE
Traditionally the state’s initial claim to necessity was that it
prevented warfare by erecting firm barriers of defense. This is tommyrot: the
duration and severity of war has always increased with an increase in state
power. Larger states, far from providing peace, merely provide larger wars,
having more human and material resources to pour into them. War is the health
of the state, as Randolph Bourne has said, precisely because it provides the
excuse for increased state power and the means by which to achieve it.
Insofar as
“defense” implies security, the state is the instrument least capable of
providing this. Indeed, in the contemporary world of massed nuclear weapons,
there simply is no defense of the citizens
from a hostile aggressor. The very presence of the state and its huge
pile of threatening weapons endangers rather than protects the populace, by
inviting pre-emptive strikes.
Moreover, in the course of attempting to provide its defense the
state exercises its own forms of coercion and violence. The U.S., for example,
entices some 2 million young people into its military and deploys them overseas
as often as it likes; it forces the wider population to pay for warfare and
its preparation through increased taxation; it sustains a military-industrial
complex organized to promote violence and does not diminish in peacetime. And
such a state, preoccupied with defense, begins to justify all acts, however
dangerous, in its name –when all you own is a hammer, as Mark Twain once said,
all problems begin to look like nails.
In sum, the long human record suggests that the problem of
defense and warfare is exacerbated, not solved, by the large state.
ECONOMIC
DEVELOPMENT
The justification for the state in classical economic theory is
that it is supposed to stabilize economies over wide geographic areas,
standardize currencies and measurements, establish protective tariff barriers
and regulate international trade, and ultimately promote economic development
and stability. To which we may add a contemporary responsibility, the
regulation of businesses on behalf of the public so that it is not recklessly
overcharged and endangered, fleeced and fummeled.
Of course
the easy response is that if this is what
the state is so vital for, it does not seem to have proved its worth. What has
characterized all large national governments, particularly in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, is their clear inability to
provide economic stability, security, or employment, to secure people against
the dangers of depression and inflation, in either capitalist or “socialist”
worlds. A nation like the United States, assumed to be the most powerful of
all, though it has a truly mighty GNP and has recently enjoyed a period of high
imperial prosperity, has not been able to forestall regular depressions,
prevent inflation, maintain the dollar, regulate trade to the benefit of
national industries, provide either jobs or income security, create a stable
retirement system, or manage any but the most meager protections against the
corporate contaminations of food, air, water, waste, or soil.
International
trade? Nothing that couldn’t be
done without the state, as is amply demonstrated by the history of Europe
between 1000 and 1500, a period of the most extensive and elaborate sort of
trade relations, fundamental to the development of capitalism, quite separate
from any national machineries. In fact, is being
done—for the operations of the current multinational corporations, as any
number of studies have shown, are essentially beyond the control of any serious
governmental regulation of any kind. Moreover, the various components of
the current international trade system have proven seriously damaging for
American manufacturing industries and for the white middle class whose incomes
have suffered over the past five decades (and who made up much of Trump’s
armies).
Regulation?
Aside from added costs to consumer and taxpayer, the trouble with governmental
regulation is that it is always a catch-up operation, fighting the problem at
the wrong end after the damage has been
done. If the only criteria in the economy are those that capitalism dictates,
as they are, then of course there will be those problems that no amount of
government law or supervision can correct; if the primary purpose of the
government is to protect the smooth workings of the corporate system, as it is,
then of course its duodenary attempt to restrain its excesses by patchwork
edicts is always doomed to failure.
But
wouldn’t the consumer be in ever more trouble without government
regulation, however expensive and inept? Perhaps so. But probably not if at the
same time the myriad government supports favoring large (and therefore largely
unresponsive) businesses were withdrawn and the small firms in the market had
to offer—as they did in an earlier age—“good goods at a fair price” in order to
compete successfully.
PUBLIC
SERVICES
The argument here is that the state is ultimately necessary on
grounds of the “criterion of competence”: only it can supply public goods
in the common interest, which individuals and communities won’t do by
themselves. Who but the state can control population growth, say, or feed the
starving, secure public health, build highway systems, provide welfare, offer
disaster relief, distribute scarce supplies? Who but the state—to pick the most
commonly cited example—can control pollution?
The hidden
assumption here, of course, is that the Federal government is in fact a solution. In real life it doesn’t
quite work out that way. The first problem is to get the government to take any
action at all, to rouse the politicians or the bureaucrats somehow, to force
the courts to intervene, and that may be an expensive and time-consuming task
for any individual, especially since the object of the appeal is probably
miles away in Washington, D.C.
The next
problem is to see to it that the action will be appropriate, that the decisions
of all these people will be wise. Immediately following comes the problem of
making sure that the wise decision can actually be carried out, that the
competence to do the job is in human, or at least bureaucratic, hands in the
first place; the inability of any government to keep the various oil spills
from polluting Alaskan and Gulf beaches suggests that there are some
matters as yet beyond its skills to solve. And making sure that it is carried out, and carried out properly, by
government officials whose interest in the task may be minimal and whose
budgets may be small, without any unintended side effects. And the final
problem is keeping the government always around to make sure that the elegant
solutions stay in place and the errant polluters don’t backslide when no one is
looking—since the solutions have been imposed on them by a higher authority
rather than drawn from them by cooperation and negotiation. Oh—and paying for
it all.
But there is a further point to that process that is pertinent
here; in the words of British philosopher Michael Taylor:
The state
… in order to expand domestic markets, facilitate common defence, and so on, encourages the weakening of local communities
in favour of the national
community. In doing so, it relieves individuals of the necessity to cooperate
voluntarily amongst themselves on a local basis, making them more dependent
upon the state. The result is that altruism and cooperative behaviour gradually decay. The state is thereby strengthened and made
more effective in its work of weakening the local community.
This is
important: there is not social service one, not one. that has not in the past
been the province of the community or some agency within the community (family,
church, guild) and that has been taken on by the state only because it first
destroyed that province. There is not one of them that could not be
re-absorbed by a community in control of its own destiny and able to see what
its natural humanitarian obligations, its humanitarian opportunities, would be. Indeed, there is not one
public service, not one, that could not be better supplied
at the local level, where the problem is understood best and quickest, the
solutions are most accessible, the refinements and adjustments are easiest to
make, the monitoring is most convenient.
SOCIAL
JUSTICE
The final argument for the necessity of the state is that it
alone can provide social justice for all its citizens and guarantee civil
rights and liberties to every individual.
To be
sure, it doesn’t, not anywhere in the world. Even in this
country, so concerned with these matters, the areas of social injustice and
individual repression are wide, and certain people—American Indians, poor
blacks, prisoners, Latinos, and, until recently, homosexuals among them—are
particularly ill-served by the state. Indeed the case could easily be made that
over the years as many inequities and injustices have been caused or fostered by the government with its left
hand—let’s mention only slavery, Indian genocide, union suppression, the Palmer
Raids, Japanese prison camps, FBI and CIA illegalities, Watergate, illegal NSA
intrusions, skyhigh black incarceration—as are prevented by
its right.
But still,
the state presumably means to
protect its individuals, and presumably they would be worse off without state
intervention. Didn’t the American government abolish slavery, establish civil
rights for blacks, outlaw segregated schools, and work to end racial
discrimination in housing, hoteling, hiring? Hasn’t it treated minorities—the
Inuit in Alaska, the chicanos in Texas—better than they would have been treated
in racist local communities?
Perhaps.
The record is by no means perfect even here on its more positive side, and many
would say that alacrity was not among its notable features—but yes, the
American government has effected certain reforms and has maintained certain
freedoms. But who exactly would want to say that this is because of the state, that the government
accomplished these goals by sighting a problem on its own, tackling it boldly,
wresting a solution? I cannot think of a single victory in this area that has
not been extracted by force from the government, has not been achieved by the
affected parties themselves, pushing, cajoling, petitioning, suing, marching,
demonstrating, usually quite on their own; and as often as not they did
so against the agents and stated policies of the
national government.
What we
generally have, in other words, is another example of the state, having taken
power into its own hands, sitting on those hands until somebody shoves it off.
That minorities are protected as much as they are is due mostly to minorities;
that individuals have the opportunities they have is due mostly to individuals;
that the press has its freedoms is due mostly to the press. The Bill of Rights,
we must not forget, was put there not as an instrument of the state for the
citizens but as a means of protecting the citizens from the state.
In a
hierarchy of necessities, the things provided by the family, the neighborhood,
the community, the small city, would certainly come first: love, fraternity,
security, cooperation, sex, comfort, order, esteem, above all rootedness. Those provided by the state—taxation,
standing armies, police, regulations, bureaucracies, courts, politicians,
nuclear power, corporate subsidies, moonshots—especially when taken in balance
with its deficiencies, would no doubt come last. Looked at that way, they just
may not even be necessities at all.
] is the
author of 12 books of political and ecological themes, including Students for a Democratic Society (1972).
He lives in South Carolina.
Copyright © 2017 Kirkpatrick Sale
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