The Age of Consent

CHAPTER 2 The Least-Worst System An Equivocal Case for Democracy

I might appear to have begun with a presumption: that a democratic world order is better than any other kind. This was not the approach with which I started my research; I sought (perhaps not always successfully) to begin without preconceptions. I was forced to adopt this as my basic political model only after examining the alternatives, the two ideologies which, within the global justice movement, compete directly or indirectly with the package of political positions most people recognize as ‘democracy’ – Marxism and anarchism.*

It is the common conceit of contemporary communists that their prescriptions have not failed; they have simply never been tried. Whenever it has been practised on a continental scale, the emancipation of the workers has been frustrated by tyrants, who corrupted Marx’s ideology for their own ends. For some years, I believed this myself. But nothing is more persuasive of the hazards of Marx’s political programme than The Communist Manifesto.18 It seems to me that this treatise contains, in theoretical form, all the oppressions which were later visited on the people of communist nations. The problem with its political prescriptions is not that they have been corrupted, but that they have been rigidly applied. Stalin’s politics and Mao’s were far more Marxist than, for example, those of the compromised – and therefore more benign – governments of Cuba or the Indian state of Kerala.

The Manifesto’s great innovation and great failure was the staggeringly simplistic theory into which it sought to force society. Dialectical materialism reduced humanity’s complex social and political relations to a simple conflict between the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’; that is to say the owners of property and the workers, by which Marx and Engels meant the industrial labourers employed by large capitalist concerns. Any class which did not conform to this dialectic was either, like the peasants, shopkeepers, artisans and aristocrats, destined to ‘decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry’, or, like the unemployed, was to be regarded as ‘social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society’,19 with no legitimate existence in a post-revolutionary world.

Unfortunately for those living under communist regimes, society did not function as Marx suggested. The peasants, aristocrats, artisans and shopkeepers did not disappear of their own accord: they, like everyone else who did not fit conveniently into the industrial proletariat, had to be eliminated, as they interfered with the theoretical system Marx had imposed on society. Marx, who described them as ‘reactionaries’ trying ‘to roll back the wheel of history’, might have approved of their extermination. The ‘social scum’ of the lumpenproletariat, which came to include indigenous people, had to be disposed of just as hastily, in case they became, as Marx warned, ‘the bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’. As the theory so woefully failed to fit society, society had to be remodelled to fit the theory. And Marx provided the perfect excuse for ruthless extermination. By personalizing oppression as ‘the bourgeoisie’ he introduced the justification for numberless atrocities. The simplicity, of both the theory and the objective, is attractive and enticing. Even today, it is hard to read The Communist Manifesto without wanting to go out and shoot a member of the bourgeoisie, in the hope of obtaining freedom from oppression.

Moreover, Marx’s industrial proletariat, modelled on the factory workers of Lancashire, upon whom he relied to foment revolution, turned out to be rather less inclined to revolt than the peasants, or, for that matter, the petty bourgeois, artisans, factory owners, aristocrats and educated middle classes from whom he drew almost all his early disciples. In order to overcome this inconvenience, Marx effectively re-invokes, in the form of bourgeois communist ideologues such as himself, the guardian-philosophers of Plato’s dictatorship. Rather than trust the faceless proletariat to make its own decisions, he appoints these guardians to ‘represent and take care of the future’ of that class.

His prescriptions, in other words, flatly fail to address the critical political question, namely ‘who guards the guards?’ Democratic systems contain, in theory at least, certain safeguards, principally in the form of elections, designed to ensure that those who exercise power over society do so in its best interests. The government is supposed to entertain a healthy fear of its people, for the people are supposed to be permitted to dismiss their government. The Communist Manifesto offers no such defences. As the ancient Greeks discovered, guardian-philosophers tend rapidly to shed both the responsibilities of guardianship and the disinterested virtues of philosophy.

Moreover, by abolishing private property and centralizing ‘all instruments of production in the hands of the State’,20 Marx granted communist governments a possibly unprecedented power over human life. Officials could decide what – indeed whether – people ate, where they lived, how they worked, even what they wore. Marx himself, in other words, devised the perfect preconditions for totalitarian dictatorship. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’21 transforms itself, with instant effect, into the dictatorship of the bureaucrat.

This problem is compounded by the Utopian myth at the heart of the Manifesto’s philosophy: that with the triumph of the proletariat, all conflict will come to an end, and everyone shall pursue, through ‘the free development of each’, ‘the free development of all’. But history does not come to an end; dialectical materialism has no ultimate synthesis. New struggles do, and must, emerge as needs change, interests diverge and new forms of oppression manifest themselves, and a system which takes no account of this is a system doomed to sclerotic corruption. Indeed, Stalin and Mao recognized this, through their perpetual discovery of the new enemies required to sustain the dynamic of power.

Marx helped the industrial working class to recognize and act upon its power. His analysis remains an indispensable means of understanding both history and economics. But his political programme, as formulated in the Manifesto, was a dead end. It stands at odds with everything we in the global justice movement claim to value: human freedom, accountability, diversity. Any attempt to systematize people by means of a simple, let alone binary, code will founder, with disastrous consequences both for those forced to conform to the Marxist ideal, and for those judged by the all-powerful state to offend it.

At first sight, anarchism appears more compatible with the ideals of a global justice movement. It is the political idea I find most attractive, and to which, almost instinctively – however much I have now come to reject it intellectually – I keep returning. For the first few years in which I had a system of political beliefs, I considered myself an anarchist. Anarchism’s purpose, of course, is to reclaim human freedom from the oppressive power of distant authority. Every atrocity committed by the state is a standing advertisement for self-government. Over the past one hundred years, as everyone knows, states have been responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of combatants and civilians in wars concocted principally for the purpose of expanding the wealth and power of the dominant elite. They have sought to destroy entire ethnic or religious groups: Jews, Roma, Tartars, Kurds, Tutsis, Bosnian Muslims, East Timorese, Maya, Mapuches and many more. They have engineered famines, destroyed ecosystems, killed political opponents and curtailed the most basic human freedoms.

Those who have succeeded in capturing the wealth and power of the state have enriched themselves enormously at public expense: both King Leopold of Belgium and his indigenous successor Mobutu Sese Seko used the Congo as his personal treasury, effectively enslaving an entire nation for the purpose of filling his own pockets. The men and women who have governed all the recent superpowers – Britain, the USSR and the United States – have sought to enhance their power and secure domestic support without redistributing wealth, by seizing control of other nations and looting their economies. When anarchists assert that the state is a mechanism for violently depriving humankind of its freedom, we are forced to agree that it has repeatedly been used for this purpose. Anarchism, as a result, presents the most consistent – and within the global justice movement the most popular – challenge to the world order this manifesto invokes, in which governance plays a major role.

But the history of the past century, or even, for that matter, the past decade, is hardly an advertisement for statelessness either. When the government of Sierra Leone lost control of its territory, the lives of its people were ripped apart by men who are commonly described as ‘rebels’, but who possessed no policy or purpose other than to loot people’s homes and monopolize the diamond trade. They evolved the elegant habit of hacking off the hands of the civilians they visited, not because this advanced any political or economic programme, but simply because no one was preventing them from doing so. Only when foreign states reasserted governance in Sierra Leone were the bandits defeated and relieved of their weapons.

When the state effectively collapsed in the former Soviet Union, losing its capacity to regulate and tax its citizens, the power vacuum was filled immediately, not by autonomous collectives of happy householders, but by the Mafia, which carved its empires out of other people’s lives. The assets of the former state were seized not by the mass of its citizens, but by a few dozen kleptocrats. Anyone who sought to resist them was shot.

For most of the past decade, the eastern Congo has been effectively stateless, and the people who in earlier eras endured the depredations of King Leopold and President Mobutu, have been repeatedly attacked by six marauding armies and scores of unaffiliated militias, squabbling over their resources. Two million people have died as a result of this ‘civil war’.

Anarchists would be quick to insist both that there is a difference between the stateless chaos of places like the eastern Congo and true anarchism (in which freely associating communities can seek mutual advantage through cooperation) and that many of the recent atrocities in stateless places were caused either by the collapse of the state or by the aggression of neighbouring states. We will turn to the first point in a moment, but it should surely be obvious that the second argument causes more problems for the anarchist position than it solves. Unless anarchism suddenly and simultaneously swept away all the world’s states and then, by equally mysterious means, prevented new states from emerging, it is hard to see how the people of anarchist communities could survive when thrust into conflict or competition with a neighbouring state, which – by definition – would possess the wherewithal to raise an army. It is just as difficult to see how they could defend themselves from the robber barons arising within their own territories, who would perceive this collapse not as an opportunity to embrace their fellow humans in the spirit of love and reconciliation, but as an opportunity to embrace their undefended resources.

It is impossible to read any history, ancient or modern, without acquiring the unhappy intelligence that Homo sapiens is a species with an extraordinary capacity for violence and destruction, and that this capacity has been exercised in most epochs in all regions of the world. Those who wish to exert power over other people or to seize their resources appear to use violence as either a first or a last resort, unless this tendency is checked by some other force, principally the fear of punishment by people with greater means of violence at their disposal. Any political system which seeks to enhance human welfare must provide the means of containing and preventing the aggression with which some people would greet others.

The state claims to do so by asserting a monopoly of violence. By attesting that only the servants of the state are permitted to use violence against other people, and then only according to the rules the state lays down, it pretends to offer protection to its citizens both from external aggression and from people with violent tendencies within its own borders. In theory a democratic state is prevented, by accountability to its people, from the arbitrary use of that violent power against its own citizens. The notional safeguards against its use of violence towards the people of other nations are less clear-cut: indeed, this is among the global democratic deficits which this manifesto seeks to address.

In mature democracies, arbitrary violence by the state against its own people is fairly limited: the police sometimes beat up protesters and members of ethnic minorities and extort confessions from suspects by violent means, while the security services occasionally assassinate troublesome citizens. The anarchists would argue, with justice, that the relatively low frequency and low intensity of state violence in democratic nations reflects the fact that most citizens, most of the time, obey the state, whether they agree with its prescriptions or not. If people were more inclined to behave as they wished – in other words, if they were more free – they would be subject to a corresponding increase in state violence.

Nor will democratic states always succeed in protecting their own people from the violence of others. There is no shortage of recent examples of popular governments being deposed by external aggression. There are also plenty of instances of state authorities turning a blind eye while a faction with which they sympathize assaults a faction towards which they are antagonistic. Recent attacks on Muslims in India have been passively witnessed, and occasionally abetted, by police and soldiers. In Britain, as I know to my cost, the police often refuse to intervene when protesters are beaten up by private security guards.

But this system (with the significant caveat that it does not, as yet, prevent the state from attacking the people of other nations) does, at least, function in theory. It could be argued that both the state’s own arbitrary violence and its toleration of the violence of certain favoured citizens are the results of the failure of its people to hold the authorities sufficiently to account. It is possible to see how, in a mature democratic state, effective campaigning by the victims of violence or their supporters could be turned into such a public embarrassment and electoral liability that the government is forced to desist. Indeed, on many occasions, precisely this has happened. There can, or so we should be inclined to hope, never be another Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland, or another sinking of a Rainbow Warrior by the French security services. Such restraint as democratic states display arises only from fear of losing public support, and therefore losing power.

No state but the dominant superpower can guarantee to defend its citizens from external aggression,* but the state does appear to be rather more capable of doing so – when it is responsive to the will of its people – than unaffiliated autonomous communities. Indeed, one of the reasons why both the Roman Empire and, 2000 years later, the British Empire, expanded so swiftly is that many of the tribes they attacked were either aggregated only loosely into states, or were not aggregated at all. Had there been no state of Nicaragua, the proxy warriors financed by the US could have overrun that region immediately, seizing the land and its resources from its people. The Sandinista government was far weaker than the United States, but, through ingenious organization, it succeeded in resisting the greater power for several years, during which it mustered the support both of other nations and of many people within the US. The eventual settlement was almost certainly less oppressive than it would have been, had the proxy warriors not encountered a regular army and the resistance and public relations coordinated by the state.

It is not clear, by contrast, that anarchism works even in theory. The problem with the model is that, for the reasons outlined above, it has either to be applied universally, or applied only in those regions which are so poor in resources that no one else would want to live there. In other words, if states continue to exist, they will seize from relatively defenceless peoples the assets which would be to their advantage. Anarchist communities which possess valuable resources can sometimes survive for short periods in accessible places, or for longer periods in remote and impassable regions. Their establishment has often been associated with emancipation and, within the community, redistribution. But these communities are always likely to be vulnerable to attack by those federations of people – which we call states – big enough to command armies and rich enough to deploy advanced military technology.

But let us suppose, as many anarchists do, that this system can, somehow, displace all states, simultaneously, worldwide. What we then discover is that this very universalism destroys the freedoms the anarchists wish to defend. Anarchists, like most people who support particular political systems, see those systems as responding to people rather like themselves. Most anarchists associate with oppressed communities, and envisage anarchism as the means by which the oppressed can free themselves from persecution. But if everyone is to be free from the coercive power of the state, then this must apply to the oppressors as well as the oppressed. The richest and most powerful communities on earth – be they geographical communities or communities of interest – will be as unrestrained by external forces as the poorest and weakest.

This is why, though both sides would furiously deny it, the outcome of both market fundamentalism and anarchism, if applied universally, is identical. The anarchists associate with the oppressed, the market fundamentalists with the oppressors, but by eliminating the state (as some, but by no means all the market fundamentalists wish to do), both simply remove such restraints as prevent the strong from crushing the weak. This, of course, is the point of market fundamentalism. But it is also the inevitable result of anarchism. If you have difficulty envisaging this, simply picture an autonomous community of impoverished black people living next to an autonomous community of well-armed white racists. For the majority of humankind to be free, we must restrain the freedom of those who would oppress us.

So the anarchists would have us make another extraordinary leap of faith. Having caused the state magically to evaporate everywhere, they also insist, without providing a convincing explanation of how this might happen in the absence of the state, that we can eliminate those disparities of wealth and power between communities which would permit one group of people to oppress another. But even that would prove inadequate. Even if every community had equal access to resources, there is nothing in the anarchist system to prevent one group from seeking to acquire more resources by invading another. Indeed, precisely this happens, almost continuously, among the nomadic tribes of that part of Africa where the borders of Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya meet. These are classic anarchist communities, with centuries of organizational experience, and far more sophisticated means of managing their resources and resolving disputes than the intentional communes of the West. They are forced into cooperation within the tribe by the erratic ecology of the lands they inhabit and their consequent inability to sustain the accumulation of wealth. They have been, by and large, abandoned by central government.