A quick addition to my last post.
The desire is to somehow hold economic power and political power apart, using each as a counterbalance against the other. To give the state absolute power over the economy is to insure vast economic inequality. Such has, generally speaking, been the lesson of history. Powerful states of the pre-modern era presided over massively unequal societies.
But there is a modern exception. Communism in Russia and Eastern Europe did produce fairly egalitarian societies; in that case, state power was used against the accumulation of wealth by the few. There still existed a privileged elite of state officials, but there was also a general distribution of economic goods. The problem, of course, was a combination of state tyranny with low productivity. The paranoia that afflicts all tyrannies led to abuses that made life unbearable.
But (actually existing) communism did show that it is possible to use state (political) power to mitigate economic inequality. Social democracy from 1945 to 1970 was also successful in this direction. Under social democracy, the economy enjoys a relative autonomy, but is highly regulated by a state that interferes to prevent large inequities.
Where there is some kind of norm that political power (defined as the ability to direct the actions of state institutions) should not either 1) be a route to economic gain or 2) be working hand-in-glove with the economically powerful to secure their positions, the violations of that norm are called “corruption.” The Marxist, of course, says that the state in all capitalist societies (the “bourgeois state”) is corrupt if that is our definition of corruption. The state will always have been “captured” by the plutocrats.
What belies that Marxist analysis is that the plutocrats hate the state and do everything in their power (under the slogan of laissez-faire) to render the state a non-player in economic and social matters. Capitalists do not want an effective state of any sort—either of the left, center, or right. A strong state of any stripe is not going to let the economy goes its own way, but will (instead) fight to gain control over it. I think it fair to say that the fight between political and economic power mirrors the fight between civil and religious power in the early days of the nation-state. The English king versus the clergy and the Pope.
The ordinary citizen, I am arguing, is better off when neither side can win this fight, when the two antagonists have enough standing to prevent one from having it all its way.
Our current mess comes in two forms, the worst of all worlds. We have a weak state combined with massive corruption. What powers the state still has are placed at the service of capital while politicians use office to get rich. We have a regulatory apparatus that is almost completely dormant. From the SEC to the IRS, from the FDA to the EPA, the agencies are not doing their jobs, but standing idly by while the corporations, financiers, and tax-evading rich do their thing.
The leftist response is to say that the whole set-up in unworkable. We need a new social organization. I have just finished reading Fredric Jameson’s An American Utopia (Verso, 2016). Interestingly enough, Jameson also thinks we need “dual power” in order to move out of our current mess. The subtitle of his book is “Dual Power and the Universal Army.” More about Jameson in subsequent posts.
Here I just want to reiterate what I take to be a fundamental liberal tenet: all concentrations of power are to be avoided; monopolies of power in any society are a disaster that mirror the equal but opposite disaster of civil war. Absolute sovereignty of the Hobbesian sort is not a solution; but the absence of all sovereignty is, as Hobbes saw, a formula for endless violence. Jameson says the key political problem for any Utopia is “federalism.” That seems right to me, if we take federalism to mean the distribution of power to various social locations. Having a market that stands in some autonomy from the state is an example of federalism. There are, of course, other forms that federalism can take. All of those forms are ways of working against the concentration of power in one place.
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