Power and the State

...Liberal politics carried an element of universality because it was attuned to the universal problem of the state, beyond that of its specifically bourgeois form...

...Every political theory which does not recognize the autonomy of politics vis a vis socio-economic history rejects out of hand the following propositions: that the problem of political power in a socialist economy is not fundamentally different from the same problem in a capitalist economy...

...The temptation of forced labor thus becomes one of the greatest available to the socialist state...

...III I should like to give several examples of this discrimination between the "universal" and "bourgeois" aspects of the liberal State: 1) Is not the independence of the judge the very first means of recourse against the abuse of power...

...Stalin was possible because no public opinion could begin to criticize him...

...The planning state, more than any other, requires the counter force of public opinion in the true sense of the term, that is, a public which has opinions and opinion which has public expression...

...Specific rationality, specific evil: such is the double and paradoxical character of politics...

...4) In short, the key is that of control of the state by the people, by the democratically organized base...

...In discovering the problem of democratic controls, the philosophes of the 18th century discovered true liberalism, which doubtless transcends the destiny of the bourgeoisie...

...lem of limiting that evil in the present...

...That is why politics is the soul of economics insofar as it expresses both will and power...

...It can do this, because it enjoys a monopoly over the means of subsistence...

...we have also learned of it through the Marxist critique of the bourgeois state founded on non-truth, on seeming, mystifying and lying...

...One need not have a preconceived idea...

...These two concepts are so important that it is upon them that Stalinism foundered...

...Even the state that is most in subjection to a dominating class is also a state precisely to the extent that it expresses the fundamental will of the nation as a whole...

...that political power in a socialist economy offers comparable or even greater possibilities for tyranny...

...3) The third task of a critique of power in a socialist regime would be to reassess the critique of the liberal state in the light of this idea of democratia control...

...It seems to me that the judge is a personage who, by the consent of all, must be voluntarily placed on the border of fundamental conflicts of society...

...Democracy is discussion...

...If the intellectuals, writers and artists played a decisive role in these events, it was because the stake—despite poverty and low salaries—was not economic and social: the stake was political: the new "alienation" which infected political power...

...The allotment and the choice of work, when the latter is not spontaneous, still arises from coercion and that coercion is linked to the transition from chance to rationalization...

...And this precisely because the socialist state is the more rational, extending design and planning to areas of human existence that had previously been left to chance or improvisation...

...The concept of "control" proceeds directly from the central paradox of man's political existence, being the practical reso lution of this paradox...

...perhaps money itself is but one among other means of domination...

...2) Is not the second condition for permanent appeal against the misuse of power that citizens should have access to sources of information, of knowledge and science, independent of those of the state...

...Consequently, only a legitimated structuring of the tensions between the state and the trade unions representing the diverse interests of the workers can guarantee the groping search for a viable equilibrium, one which is both economically profitable and humanly tolerable...

...To opportunities for abuse which thus arise must be added the temptation to overcome irrational opposition by means more rapid than those of discussion and education...

...The ra tio of part reinvested to part consumed, the proportion of cultural to material goods in the general equilibrium of the plan derives from a total strategic vision in which economics injects itself into politics...

...The problem, however, is to know whether the end of private ownership of the means of production will or can entail the end of all forms of alienation...

...This is evident in a socialist period in the precise sense of the term, that is a period of inequality of salaries and professional specialization which places workers, managers, intellectuals in opposition to one an 48 other...

...He finds himself pressed to the very fore of the revolution, not merely into the ranks, when its motive force is more political than economic, when it concerns the relationship of power to truth and justice...

...but the tyrant must not be allowed to rise to power...

...Few men have so discounted the state as have the great Marxists: "As long as the proletariat still needs the state," reads the Letter to Bebel, "it needs it not to guarantee freedom, but to suppress its enemies, and the day when it will become possible to speak of freedom, the State as such will have ceased to exist...

...But it is essential to notice that the theory of the withering away of the state is a logical consequence of the reduction of political alienation to economic alienation...

...The planning state, which thinks in terms of generations, has a project more vast and more remote than has the individual, whose interest is more immediate, usually limited to the horizon of his own life-span or that of his children...

...A plan is a technique put at the service of a project animated by implicit values, of a project which in the last analysis concerns the very human ity of man...

...In short, the socialist state is more "ideological" than the "liberal" state...

...But immediately this choice becomes more than economic...

...Now our [French] parliamentary techniques of alternating majorities in power does not seem very compatible with the tasks of the new state rationality...

...The micro-interests of individuals and the macro-decisions of power are in constant tension, and this tension de 46 velops a dialectic of individual demand and state compulsion which makes misuse of power possible...

...It is true that Marx, Engels and Lenin attempted to relate to experience the theory of the withering away of the state...

...This linkage of ethics and technique in the planning "task" is the fundamental reason why an administration of things implies a government of persons...

...This is why the revival of liberal politics is possible within a socialist context...

...One concerns the division between investment and immediate consumption, the other the determination of norms and tempo in production...

...Moreover, it is political power which in the final instance mediates between the latent aspirations of the ,human community and the technological means derived from knowledge of economic laws...

...On the other hand it is no less certain that free discussion is a vital necessity for the state: discussion gives it impetus and orientation, discussion curbs its abuses...

...This will be putting to use the idea developed above that the most rational state has the greatest opportunities for being irrational...

...It is the task of political philosophy to educidate the paradox...

...By a malevolent paradox the thesis of the provisional character of the state becomes the best justification for the endless prolongation of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," thus paving the way for totalitarianism...

...2) It must also be shown how reinforcement of state power, linked to the growth of the socialist state's spheres of action, develops possibilities of abuses intrinsic to it as a socialist state...

...if it is true that it advances its rationality and increases opportunities for perversion, then the problem of democratic control of the state is even more urgent in a socialist than in a capitalist regime and the myth of the withering away of the state is an obstacle to a systematic treatment of this problem...

...Through this primary characteristic, man's political existence develops a specific type of rationality which cannot be reduced to economics...

...In promising too much tomor row, the thesis of the withering away of the state also tolerates too much today...

...There is, for example, the resistance characteristic of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie who cannot adapt to the rhythm of the technocrats but remain adjusted to former conditions...

...And Marx could even say: "The commune was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word...

...3) Thus it seems to me that a labor democracy requires a certain dialectic between the state and the independent workers' organizations...

...But today, after the bitter experience of Stalinism, the distinction between an instrument of class domination and democratic control in general thrusts itself upon us...

...On the one hand, politics embodies a human relationship which is not reducible to class conflict or socio-economic tensions in general...

...Precisely...

...It is a function of a general politics, that is, of a long-term project concerning the orientation of the human community...

...The task of a critique of socialist power is to show, lucidly and honestly, the new possibilities of political alienation which are linked to the very struggle against economic alienation and to the increase in state power which that struggle entails...

...The revolts in eastern Europe crystallized around the "abstract" ideas of justice and truth...

...45 Thus, an administration of things cannot be substituted for a government of persons, because the rational technique of ordering man's needs and works on the ,macroscopic scale of the state cannot wholly free itself from the ethical-cultural context...

...Stalin was possible because there were always judges to judge according to his decree...

...And if the citizens cannot by themselves form opinions concerning these massive decisions, this power will be less and less distinguishable from totalitarian power...

...Without this projection, in which the state represents itself as lawful, the individual is at the mercy of the state and power itself is unprotected against its own arbitrariness...

...Only a political philosophy which has recognized the specific func tion and specific evil of politics is in a position to state the problem of political control correctly...

...The case for the multiple parties system is advanced by the fact that in the past this system has not only reflected tensions between social groups as determined by class division, but has also furnished an organization for political discussion as such, thus having "universal" and not only "bourgeois" meaning...

...I If the State is simultaneously both more rational and more irrational than the individual, then the great problem of democracy is that of control of the state by the people...

...Perhaps private ownership is in itself but one form of man's power over man...

...Even as it projects the end of the evil of the state into an indeterminate future, it underestimates the practical prob...

...It is precisely here that the intellectual as such is involved in politics...

...Just as the rationality of 43 the state may not simply be derived from socio-economic history and its evils attributed to class contradictions, so must the problem of the control of the state be viewed as an irreducible one...

...For if the state is solely an organ of repression which arises from class antagonisms and expresses the domination of a class, then the state will disappear when the class division of society is no more...

...Carrying out a plan demands plain powers, a stable government and a long-term budget...

...This reduction of political alienation has, in effect, led Marx ism-Leninism to substitute for the problem of controlling the state that of its withering away...

...The right to strike in particular seems to me to be the only recourse of the workers against the state, even against the workers' state...

...11 My working hypothesis, by contrast, is that the state cannot wither away...

...Perhaps it has ,been definitively compromised by linkage with economic liberalism...

...Society requires for its human respiration an "ideal" function, a willed abstraction in which it projects the idea of legality which 47 legitimates the reality of power...

...the people have not been allowed to speak...

...Since planning gives this state the economic monopoly over psychological coercion (culture, press and propaganda are comprehended in the plan and thus economically determined by the state) , it will have at its disposal a whole arsenal of means, ranging from stimulation and emulation to deportation...

...perhaps the same spirit of domination expresses itself in exploitation through money, bureaucratic tyranny, intellectual dictatorship and clericalism...

...Do a plurality of parties, the technique of "free elections," and parliamentary government arise from the "universality" of the liberal state or do they belong irremediably to the bourgeois period of that state...

...The rational state, in effect, encounters resistance of all sorts...

...In the thinking of Marx and Lenin the withering away thesis was not hypocritical but sincere...

...The postulate that the will of the socialist state and the interests of all the workers directly coincide is a pernicious illusion and a dangerous pretext for the abuse of state power...

...Translated from the French by LEONARD PRAGER 49...

...it must be controlled by special institutional techniques...

...Engels has clearly demonstrated in his Anti-Duhring that, as long as there persist the old division of labor and the other alienations which make of work a burden rather than a joy, the organization of production will remain authoritarian and repressive even after the expropriation of the expropriators...

...but not all forms of resistance are so readily explained...

...One must go still further and assert that the socialist state requires a more vigilant popular control than the bourgeois state...

...The state should exist, but not in excess...

...This implies a press which belongs to its readers and not to the state, and whose freedom of inquiry and expression are constitutionally and economically guaranteed...

...It is clear that, among other reasons, the trials of Moscow, Budapest and Prague were possible because the independence of the judge was not technically insured nor ideologically established in a theory of the judge as man above class, as abstraction in human guise, as law incarnate...

...Analysis of the concept of the party solely in terms of socio-economic interests seems to me dangerously simplistic...

...And even now it is the post-Stalinist state alone which has condemned Stalin...

...It is also apparent in a period of rapid and even forced industrialization...

...The problem of controlling the state consists in developing institutional techniques spe cially designed to make the exercise of power possible and the abuse of power impossible...

...We are aware of at least two manifestations of this dichotomy between the state's goal and that of the citizen...

...These evils cannot be reduced to others, particularly not to economic alienation...

...They interpreted the Paris Commune as showing that the dictatorship of the proletariat can be something quite different from the simple transfer of the state's repressive power into other hands, that it can actually mean the destruction of the state machine as a "special force" of repression...

...But if they term can be saved, it will express that which must be said: whether the state establishes liberty through its rationality or whether liberty, through resistance, limits the irrationality of power, the central problem of politics is liberty...

...The state and the individual do not share the same time scheme and thus the individual develops interests which are not easily reconciled to the needs of the state...

...It is for this reason that the reduction of political alienation to economic alienation seems to me the weak point in Marxist political thinking...

...This is why the notions of multiple parties and single party must not be judged solely from the point of view of class dynamics, but also from the point of view of techniques for controlling the state...

...Thus in one way or another discussion must be organized, and it is here that the question of parties poses itself...

...It is certain that planning techniques demand that the socialist form of production be as irrevocable as the republican form of our [French] government...

...This notion can also serve as cover and pretext for the perpetuation of terrorism...

...Consequently, economic exploitation can disappear while political evil persists...

...On the other hand, politics develops evils of its own—evils specific to the exercise of power...

...As Lenin said, "It is impossible to pass from capitalism to socialism without some return to primitive democracy...

...All these thoughts converge towards the same conclusion: if it is true that the socialist state rather than abolishing the power problem, renews it...

...Here are some directions in which research on the problem of power under socialism might move: 1) One must examine to what degree "the administration of things" is necessarily "a government of persons" and to what degree progress in the administration of things gives rise to an increase in the political power of man over man...

...and therefore that public controls as strict as, if not stricter than, those imposed in capitalist societies are necessary under socialism...

...This may be dismissed as merely an habituation to outmoded economic conditions...

...should direct, organize and decide, so that the political animal himself may exist...

...Under the pretext of revolutionary discipline and technocratic efficiency, the socialist state can justify the complete regimentation of human minds...

...Now the problem of political alienation, as we know it since Plato's Gorgias...

...Planning implies choice of an economic character concerning order of priority in the satisfaction of needs and in the utilization of the means of production...

...The aim here would be to distinguish which of the institutional arrangements of the liberal state are independent of the phenomenon of class domination and specifically adapted to limiting abusive power...

...I do not know if the term "political liberalism" can be saved from discredit...

...The autonomy of politics—for which I shall argue in this essay— seems to me to consist of two characteristics...

...We have seen that the modern state, from the time that it economically orients all man's choices through the large decisions of its planners, determines his way of life...

...Almost inevitably the liberal state had to appear as a hypocritical medium for permitting economic exploitation...

...Since the rationality of a state which plans to end class division is greater than that of its predecessors, its potential power and the opportunities offered to tyranny are also greater...

...Perhaps the principle of this revaluation is contained within Marxism itself, in that it teaches us that a class in its ascendant phase fulfills a universal function...

...Some will say that the independence of the judge is an abstraction...

...Moreover, the state as such need not be radically affected by major changes in the economic sphere...

...The very means developed by the state to end economic exploitation can provide the occasion for abuses of power, abuses which while new in expression or effect are nonetheless essentially the same in their irrational force as those perpetrated by previous states...

...is the problem of non-truth...

...We have seen that the long-range interests of the state, even aside from economic problems, do not coincide immediately with those of the workers...

...It can reclaim for itself the old dreams of unifying the domain of truth in an orthodoxy encompassing all the manifestations of knowledge and all expressions of the human word...

...If the armed people takes the place of the permanent army, if the police can be dismissed at any moment, if the bureaucracy is dismantled as 44 an organized body and reduced to the lowest salaried condition, then the general force of the majority of the people replaces the repressive special force of the bourgeois state and the beginning of the withering away of the state coincides with the dictatorship of the proletariat...