Whatever happened to the extended state?
| Author | Whitehead, Alan |
| Position | Features - State's meaning |
We are accustomed to the use of the word 'state' in general political discourse--the 'nanny state', 'state secrets', 'state benefits', 'the long arm of the state', 'state opening of parliament' and so on--without defining it. All these phrases and many others imply the existence of some kind of body behind everything that goes on in the quotidian world of politics, but what exactly is it? And for democratic socialists is that body behind everything else significant or not--is, for example, the possession of 'political power' (e.g. winning an election) the same as 'state power'? Textbook definitions don't really get us very much further. Here's one from an undergraduate textbook: 'the stable possession of preponderant power by a single authority within a delimited territory'. It's about territory and power then? But other than introducing debates about whether the medieval Hanseatic league was a state (power but not territory) or whether the EU is now a 'state' (territory but arguably not much power) we are still stuck in the sidings.
Max Weber, widely regarded as the 'father' of modern sociology, is credited with redefining the power-territory definition fundamentally in a 1919 lecture by emphasising that 'a state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory' (Weber, 2000, p4). Weber considers that a meaningful state exists where it is considered the 'sole source of the right to use violence' and that 'the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it'. Weber also considers that in states such as the United Kingdom, where, he says, 'Parliament gained supremacy over the monarch', the state is pretty much coterminus with parliament--that is, parliament has gained from the monarch the final right to violence and delimits or extends it by parliamentary decisions based on the legitimacy its institution provides.
But of course there were theorists before Weber who made the 'monopoly of violence' link with the basic function of the state behind its various daily manifestations--and they drew very different conclusions about what it meant in practice.
Marx and Engels refer throughout their work to force as the ultimate state function, but they emphasise that force and violence is an active part of the state's ideological function, and not something that is subject to the power of whoever has political control of the state apparatus. Marx and Engels state in The Communist Manifesto that 'the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie' ([1848] 1967, p44) , Violence, or the threat of it, was to maintain the power and control of the things the state could do and this threat was present as an instrument of class rule regardless of the apparent mode of government within the state machine.
The 'legitimisation' of violence at the hand of the state, even if it involved elections to confirm the rulers in place, did not, in Marx's view, disguise its overall purpose in any way. Engels put it bluntly: 'In reality', he wrote, 'the state is nothing more than a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy' (1977, p18). If this is so, then there isn't a great deal of mileage in participating peacefully in those elections, or engaging in Weber's 'political association', because you simply wouldn't get anywhere. If you wanted to change society, if you wanted to right the wrongs that you perceived to be a part of its present settlement, then peacefully working with others to bring a majority of like-minded parliamentarians who would use the legitimacy that their majority would bring to right the wrongs was a waste of time: the 'state' eventually wouldn't let you. 'The working class', Marx said, 'cannot simply lay hold on the ready-made state machinery and wield it for their own purpose' (1977, p50).
So the only alternative was, in Marx's eyes, not the appropriation of ready-made and neutral machinery, not even the transformation of the state to benign purposes, but the smashing of the state as it stood through revolutionary means, and on smashing it, introducing your own 'body of armed men', but this time to turn the tables and oppress the defeated bourgeoisie via your own state apparatus. Under these circumstances, Marx suggested 'there corresponds ... a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat' (1972, p28). If that doesn't sound feasible or very promising, it is worth reflecting that today four of the five states sitting around the table in the UN Security Council obtained the legitimacy that among other things entitles them to pronounce on attempts to do that by other people across the world by precisely those means. The fifth, the United Kingdom, may have joined the club had it not been for the feebleness in office of the Lord Protector's son, Richard Cromwell.
So what then is 'the state'? Is it neutral or not, and if it really does have, by definition, the monopoly of violence, are democratic socialists wasting their time by seeking power through peaceful and constitutional means? If the state indeed isn't neutral, what is then wrong with Marx's argument for socialists wanting to make the changes that they believe will bring about a just and egalitarian society? I wrote an extended pamphlet for the 'Clause Four' group in 1980 entitled 'Socialists versus the extended state', which tried to address this point. Part of my purpose in doing so (I admit!) was to underpin theoretically those democratic socialists in the Labour movement who were then doing daily battle with the 'Militant' in the so-called 'clash of ideas' that they were keen on promoting. But this was buttressed by a central deceit, namely that they really had some interest in the Labour Party and were not simply supporting Labour 'as a rope supports a hanging man', as Lenin...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
