Whatever happened to the extended state?
April 2007
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) were still stuck in the sidings.
Max Weber, widely regarded as the ‘father’of modern sociology, is credited with reefing the power-territory definition fundamentally in a 1919 lecture by emphasizing that ‘a state is a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’(Weber :4) 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 ‘the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie’(Marx and Engels: 44) , 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’.(Engels: 18) 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 tow 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.’(Marx (a): 50)
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 upon 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’.(Marx (b): 28) 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 upon 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 Protectors 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 who were then doing daily battle with the ‘Militant’ in the so-called ‘clash of ideas’ that they were keen on promoting, but was, in truth 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’,(Lenin: 73) as Lenin memorably described entrist tactics in social-democrat parties of the time. Mercifully, the ‘militant’ and their creed are now long gone from the Party, but the conundrum remains: what are we doing as socialists taking part in the variety of ‘legitimate’ activities that we do if the state is not neutral towards us and what we do?
I argued that, whilst it can be said with meaning that ‘the state’ - in this instance the British State, is not neutral in that it supports particular ways of doing things economically, upholds a framework of general inequality in property and opportunity within its structure, and allows for ‘unlimited accumulation’ of wealth on the part of those people who have the property rights and economic agency, it has virtually never been true in the history of the British state that the legitimisation of these relations ever came anywhere near being upheld by the said ‘body of armed men’: that there is now, and has been for a long time, a superstructure of robust civil society over and above the basic bolted girders of the state which ensures that this would not be so. That means a fundamental different starting point for socialists: as Gramsci put it (and at that point I quoted him) ‘In Russia, the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous. In the west there was a proper relationship between state and civil society, and when the state trembled, a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed’.(Gramsci: 243)
In a ‘gelatinous and primordial’ state, one could argue that getting a pile of guns and capturing the buildings that looked like the state lived in them would be sufficient, and that, before you were in a position to do this , simply agitating in the workplace to recruit the people who would do this was the covert tasks that socialists had to undertake. Even if you accepted the moral and ethical issues that went with such an approach, ( and significant numbers of wholly committed Russian socialists did not , and generally met a grisly fate as a result) to stand and argue that this was about it (as the ‘Militant’ did) in the modern British state was above all, simply a waste of time. Not only was ‘the state’ not inhabiting the post office and the barracks, but as Gramsci suggested, its function in legitimising itself proceeds far further, into the myriad of organisations, and people who made up ‘civil society’ and who could be expected, in adversity to rally to the defence of the state far more effectively than a failing ‘body of armed men’ could have done when pressed by the Red army. But not only that, ‘civil society’ possessed a positive benefit to the extended state in that it enabled the boundaries of common sense to be defined: within a an advanced political democracy coupled with a less advanced constitutional and economic system, the extended state was no longer concerned to instrumentalise it legitimacy by determining what was said: rather it defined what could not be said, and what would not get a hearing within the political and civil process. Indeed, the revolutionary grouplets of the day could be said to serve that process by being demonstrably ’outside’ common sense yet bolstering the states legitimacy by being tolerated without being heard.
So the emphasis, I argued had to be on precisely that ‘civil society ‘- any transformation of the state would need to be on the basis of the consent of those organisations, institutions and individuals who inhabited it. The task would have to be , to put it over-simply, to ‘move common sense to the left’ so that conditions would be laid which would enable change to take place and sustain itself. That meant both Parliamentary and extra parliamentary activity, working together to change the basis of state legitimacy, and hence how the state would react to the onset of transformational politics. The role of a socialist Party would be, among other things, to contain in its ranks substantial elements of ‘permanent persuaders‘ for such a transformation of civil society (and I argued that if it didn’t exist, it would have been necessary for democratic socialists to invent something like the Labour Party, warts and all, in Britain.)
That formulation I characterised (perhaps presciently) as ‘third road’ politics, meaning in this instance something between liberal reformism and insurrectionism. A politics of the state that had greater ambitions that occasional amelioration, but was based on democratic values, and on the basis of consent, not co-coercion.
So looked at from the vantage point of twenty five years later, did that make sense at the time, and does it make sense now - or was it just a rather baroque way of plumping in the end for the gradualism that had seemed to many in 1979 to have failed as a way forward in Parliament and in Government?
A number of movements in civil society and in political discourse have taken place since that give colour to the question.
Firstly, the conservative Government that had just been elected at that stage unfolded, ideologically, as an almost mirror image of the theory of ‘moving common sense to the left’, but in this instance, what could be described as a ‘passive revolution’ within the already existing apparatus of the extended state to turn common sense to the right. Indeed, this is precisely the task that a number of leading new-right theoreticians had set conservatives in the 1980s. Roger Scruton, for example, writing in the’ Salisbury Review set out that ‘it is necessary to establish a conservative dominance in intellectual life, not because this is the quickest or most certain way to political influence, but because in the long run it is the only way to create a climate of opinion favourable to the conservative cause’.(Scruton R.) This presaged a style and a method very different from that of previous Conservative Governments and Party managers. After all, conservatives up to then had, as sir Keith Joseph remarked at the time become ‘….identified with the shifting middle ground…we were inhibited from fighting a vigorous battle of ides….we became identified with an unworkable status quo’.(Russel: 158)
‘Thatcherism’ became identified instead with an ideological window through which people could see the world. Central themes relating to ‘common sense’ household management, like lower taxes ‘having more in you r pocket to spend’ or the state, like good households ‘not spending more than you earn’ became central - minimal economic government, but backed up with strong messages on law and order, patriotism and traditional morality. As Michael Jacobs describes it ‘it emphasises private consumption and the right to a ‘choice’. It glorifies the market and the mysterious qualities of ‘enterprise’. Through skilful assertion and frequent repetition, these themes have come to dominate our political culture, so that it is difficult to see beyond them. Those experiences and ideas people have which don’t fit into the world view become excluded from public politics’. (Jacobs: 7)
This cultural and economic message - frankly a wildly successful rebalancing of the locus of what looked like common sense in the 1980s was underpinned by a stark political message which again departed from that of previous conservative political presentation. No longer were democratic socialists decent people who were sadly possessed of inadvisable ideals, but the very existence of a party professing democratic socialism and threatening to get into government again was projected as against the national interest - a fundamental threat to the common sense settlement that Thatcherism was seeking to put into place. That theme was repeated in the 1980s, but popped up in the 1979 election manifesto itself : ‘It is not just that Labour have governed Britain badly. They have reached a dead end. The very nature of their party prevents them from governing successfully in a free and mixed economy’. (Conservative Party :30) And it has to be said that in the early 80s Labour gave a good impression of agreeing with that sentiment, a position that elicited a media led lionising of supposed middle ground alternatives, and came close to ushering in an American style settlement of two anti-socialist parties as the main contenders for future power, with (as is the case in the US) democratic socialist movements and parties legally tolerated but largely placed beyond the common sense of political exchange. Shifting the boundaries of common sense appeared to work, at least for an extended period of time.
Secondly, over a remarkably short time in the late 80s and early 90s the entire edifice of what seemed ten years earlier to be an intellectually bankrupt but from the viewpoint of state organisation a reasonably robust system simply crashed and collapsed. The speed of the crash perhaps fades with memory, but I recall talking to a friend from West Berlin in the late summer of 1989, when East Germans were crossing the newly opened border between Hungary and Austria. How long before the Berlin Wall comes down’ I asked. Oh I think in about twenty years or so’ was her reply. Three months later the wall was opened to all and speedily dismantled.
That was, not just the end of soviet-style communism, but to many the ‘end of history’ as well. Francis Fukuyama had written his tract ‘ ‘The end of history’ before the Wall came down, but by then, Perestroika notwithstanding, the signs of collapse were all around. Fukuyama has been misunderstood in his thesis: he was not proposing that ‘history’ would cease to happen (a kind of Marxist ‘administration of things’ in reverse) but that the end of the idea of history as an inevitable process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis resulting in the transcendence of capitalism had come about. If there is to be a settled system of politics and state organisation, then it is to be one based on bourgeois liberal democracy, and not on the dictatorship of the proletariat. (Fukuyama 1989)
The consequence of these cataclysms for democratic socialists have been mixed. On the one hand those who always emphasised that you can’t expect socialism to work without democracy have been proved right: but we sort of knew that anyway. The sweeping away of those systems (and the emergence of China as an arch-capitalist state also without democracy, and equally unlikely to sustain itself as a working state in the long term) has, however, taken away from the international stage even the semblance of a debate about economic systems, and strengthened the hand of those, such as Milton Friedman who claimed that democracy was only possible in the context of a certain series of assumptions about economic and state management. ‘A society which is socialist cannot also be democratic in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom’ he writes in ‘Capitalism and Freedom’, and goes on to say why he concludes this: ‘political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow man…the fundamental threat to freedom is the power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority…….By removing the organisation of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power.’(Friedman: 8-13) his statement is that there should be no ‘political’ interference in economic activity - it only makes things worse and ends up destroying individual freedom (including freedom to accumulate on an unlimited basis). But this is, of course essentially what states do: the modern extended state, if it is to deliver good standards of education , health welfare and human well-being to its citizens will need to rely on what to Friedman and his ilk looks like a great deal of ‘coercion’ - surveillance, recording, economic redistribution and so on. This is where the ‘passive revolution’ of Thatcherism has been rolled back: the minimal state, allowing for the unfettered operation of ‘the market’ in all public exchanges has not established itself, and has, indeed been rolled back to a considerable extent. Significantly, the ‘new’ Tory opposition in the UK appears to be moving towards an acceptance of a substantial interventionist role for the state in public provision - a far cry from the triumphal of the minimal contract state espoused by its leader just a few years earlier.
But the primacy of the market over politics lives and thrives on a wider stage with the rise of globalism as an unchallenged economic system operating outside of the influence of any particular state, but requiring a series of concessions and limitations in the management of individual states to enable them to ‘benefit’ from the free trade and market led exchanges that globalism promotes. It functions, essentially as Friedman predicts - the peeling away of ‘markets’ from any form of accountability. A democratically organised state, whatever the objective strength of its civil society, cannot hold such a system to account in its own right, and yet it has obligations of participation in the system that take a number of such decisions for it, and on behalf of its citizens. And this development, too, involves a curious form of common sense - assumptions about what can and cannot be done, and what is outside the realm of debate. - but of course it is difficult to see at what points the debate can be joined in the first place. Will Hutton describes Globalism’s political influence thus: ’ one of the facets of globalisation is that it has generated its own ‘common sense’ world view underpinning its advance: namely that economic and social policy should be run according to the canons of the Washington consensus. Thus the issue is not just that the financial markets have awesome power: it is that they have generated their own ideology which is not subject to scrutiny, debate, or any form of accountability: it should be part of the public realm, but it is not’(Hutton :389)
It is certainly true that, when I wrote in 1980 I did not anticipate the rise of global economic management its effect on democracy, and the possibility of change within nation states that it represents to the extent that I should have. It is true also that the effect of ‘passive revolution’ within states, and the extent to which right-leaning changes in the locus of common sense have been buttressed and legitimised by arguments that stripping economics out of politics are ‘just the way the world is going’ have reinforced each other in ways that I had not either fully anticipated. The overthrow of the conservative government has, in many ways not been because of a move of common sense to the left, but in spite of it. It was a Government that in the end, through its exhaustion , ineptitude and sleaziness connived almost in its own end, but that still leaves us, in many ways with the success of at least many cultural aspects of the preceding decades ‘passive revolution’ in place - in media content and mores, in many of the me-generation assumptions and the emergence of anti--politics as a force for passivity in the face of rapid change, and the withdrawal of many from community participation or even the act of voting.
One might conclude that the best that can be said, therefore is that it certainly puts the lid on any arguments for neo-revolutionary socialism as any sort of way forward. If they were wrong in 1980, they are certainly wrong now. The idea that any of the worlds leading states are , in the foreseeable future, going to be overthrown by quasi-Leninist means, is risible. But what can be said, alternatively about the long march through the institutions, and the moving of common sense to the left? Surely , if states can no longer function as states because of the pressures of external economics upon them, than what is the point? Amelioration within the shrinking pool of remaining state power is perhaps all there is.
Philip Bobbitt concludes this about nation-states as they now are:
‘No nation state can assure its citizens safety from weapons of mass destruction: no nation state can, by obeying its own national laws )including its international treaties) be assured that its leaders will not be arraigned as criminals or its behaviour be used a s a legal justification for international coercion: no nation state can effectively control its own economic life or its own currency: no nation state can protect its culture and way of life from the depiction of images and ideas, however foreign and offensive; no nation state can protect its society from transactional perils, such as ozone depletion, global warming and infectious epidemics’. (Bobbitt: 228)
And yet….and yet. Some remarkable changes have taken place within the UK since 1997, even within a public milieu of personal detachment from the polity. I suggested in my 1980 pamphlet that ‘successive Labour governments have made little real impact upon the arrangements of the state apparatus…..Labour has not even achieved the most elementary of steps to secure even the most ephemeral of parliamentary control over the activities of the state…..by taking steps such as abolishing the house of Lords’. Well, here we are twenty five years later with almost all the hereditary peers gone, and the prospect of the rest going shortly, to be replaced by a mostly elected chamber. The role of the Lord Chancellor as head of the judiciary and the position of the Lords as supreme court in the UK has been ended, and a separate, UK supreme Court is in the process of being established. Just a few years ago such moves would have been greeted as near-treason by Montesquieu inspired advocates of a balance between democracy in one house and ‘the right sort of chaps’ guaranteeing the integrity of the state. But in practice the reforms went through as a reasonable exercise in the modernisation of the state, and not as the beginning of the road to tyranny.
The effect of these changes upon the traditional substance of the state, along with the rapid transition of the ‘secret state’ into the ‘visible state’ with freedom of information legislation and the assumed ‘right to know’ on most matters of government and state activity, have been widely underestimated, but they do mark important departures for the assumptions behind how the state works - and they are small swallows of a change in political commonsense within the UK state apparatus.
Bobbitt mentions the disappearance of states ability to protect their citizens from ozone depletion and global warming, but here he is not accurate: nation states never could protect their citizens from these events: it is just that we didn’t know about them before. The rapidly changing ‘common sense’ on climate change embodies a recognition that co-operative action beyond the state will be necessary to keep our world habitable, and in that sense starts to counter the strand of global economic unaccountability that Will Hutton expresses. The looming catastrophe of man-made climate change and our understanding of what possible remedies might consist of throws up a paradox: Action to combat climate change needs to go beyond state boundaries and embrace the international community to get under way: but functioning , interventionist redistributivist states will be necessary to make the measures actually work - to ensure compliance, to allocate and police carbon trading allowances and keep overall emissions on a downward path. Free market economics simply cannot, and will not do so; and a challenge to the ability of the world to respond to global warming ids presented by minimal or non-functioning states, and not by organised social-democratic polities. The rapidly emerging ‘common sense’ that aircraft emissions can only be counted into action to combat global warming by placing them into the framework of the emerging quasi-state of the EU to make them work - and that there needs to be state direction and initiative to make it happen: and the recognition that within the UK, we are going to have to rely on collective measures on house building, energy supply, and probably in much of our future transport needs ; these all point to a rapid change in ‘common sense’ on what the state can or cannot do . Even Francis Fukuyama in a 2006 postscript to his book of the paper ‘the end of history and the last man’ acknowledges the strength of Europe as an alternative to the US model. Europe, he rather curiously now suggests, is a much fuller real world embodiment of the [end of history] concept than is the contemporary United States. (Fukuyama 2006)
Paul Ekins towards the end of a long polemic on how environmental crisis has to be met by local, non-statist action, nevertheless concludes:
‘State power has a vital role to play in people’s self-development. It must provide the basic institutions to encapsulate and frame the market so that the market mechanism may work to general advantage. It must guarantee continuing access for all people to the resources for production and development, both monetary and non-monetary in nature. And it must implement basic norms of social justice which narrows differentials in society by progressively enabling the disadvantaged to provide for their own needs from their own resources and participate fully in its mainstream life ’ (Ekins: 208)
Ekins is right: but what he describes is a state that functions on the legitimacy of a transformed understanding of the cultural and economic norms it should work within; but one that looks to be the necessary long term foundation for a low carbon, energy thrifty society that balances its environmental books.
‘Moving common sense to the left’ always was a diffuse and daunting undertaking as a framework for political action. It is still so, and the stages upon which it may be practiced are changing and becoming more complex - but the maxim holds good.
This article was originally published in Renewal Volume 15 No.1
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