them to others. However, would not this pattern, whatever it was, be bound to remain hypothetical, and property and liberty inviolate, if the constitution forbade the state to touch them, or at least laid down fixed limits to what it may touch? It is to come to terms with the constitutional constraint on democratic policies that chapter 4, “Redistribution,” starts with some remarks on fixed constitutions. It is suggested that the ostensible constraint of a constitution may be positively useful to the state as a confidence-building measure, but that it is unlikely to remain fixed if it does not coincide with the prevailing balance of interests in society. The prospective pay-off from amending it is available as an inducement for a coalition of the required size for passing the amendment (though this is not a sufficient condition for triggering off constitutional change).
The mechanics of obtaining majority support under democratic rules are first considered in a highly simplified abstract case in the section “Buying Consent.” If people differ from each other only in how much money they have, and if they vote for the redistributive programme under which they gain most (or lose least), the rival programmes offered by the state and the opposition will be closely similar (one being marginally less bad for the rich than the other). Under the spur of competition for power, everything that can safely be taken from the prospective losers has to be offered to the prospective gainers, leaving no “discretionary income” for the state to dispose of. As a consequence, its power over its subjects’ resources is all used up in its own reproduction, in merely staying in power.
A less abstract version (“Addictive Redistribution”) where people, and hence their interests, differ in an indefinite variety of respects, and the society within which preponderant support must be obtained is not atomistic but can have intermediate group structures between man and state, yields results which are fuzzier but hardly less bleak for the state. Redistributive gains tend to be habit-forming both at the individual and the group level. Their reduction is apt to provoke withdrawal symptoms. While in the state of nature the integration of people into cohesive interest groups is held in check by (potential or actual) “free riding,” the emergence of the state as the source of redistributive gains both permits and incites unchecked group formation to exact such gains. This is so in as much as state-oriented interest groups can tolerate the free riding among their members that would destroy market-oriented groups.
Each interest group, in turn, has an incentive to act as a free rider in relation to the rest of society, the state being the vehicle permitting this to be done without meeting serious resistance. There is no reason to expect the corporatist ideal of constituting very large groups (all labour, all employers, all doctors, all shopkeepers) and having them bargain with the state and with each other, greatly to alter this outcome. Thus, in time, the redistributive pattern becomes a crazy quilt of loopholes and asymmetrical favours along industrial, occupational or regional dimensions or for no very apparent rhyme and reason, rather than along the classic rich-to-poor or rich-to-middle dimension. Above all, the evolution of the pattern increasingly escapes the state’s overall control.
In the section “Rising Prices” the group structure of society promoted by addictive redistribution is assumed to impart an ability to each group to resist or recover any loss of its distributive share. One symptom of the resulting impasse is endemic inflation. A related one is the complaint of the state about society becoming ungovernable, lacking any “give” and rejecting any sacrifice that adjustment to hard times or just random shocks would require.
The social and political environment resulting in large part from the state’s own actions eventually calls forth a widening divergence between gross and net redistribution (“Churning”). Instead of robbing Peter to pay Paul, both Peter and Paul come to be paid and robbed on a growing variety of counts (much gross redistribution for a small and uncertain net balance); this causes turbulence and is destined to generate disappointment and frustration.
The state has, at this stage, completed its metamorphosis from mid-nineteenth-century reformist seducer to late twentieth-century redistributive drudge, walking the treadmill, a prisoner of the unintended cumulative effects of its own seeking after consent (“Towards a Theory of the State”). If its ends are such that they can be attained by devoting its subjects’ resources to its own purposes, its rational course is to maximize its discretionary power over these resources. In the ungrateful role of drudge, however, it uses all its power to stay in power, and has no discretionary power left over. It is rational for it to do this just as it is rational for the labourer to work for subsistence wages, or for the perfectly competitive firm to operate at breakeven. A higher kind of rationality, however, would lead it to seek to emancipate itself from the constraints of consent and electoral competition, somewhat like Marx’s proletariat escaping from exploitation by revolution, or Schumpeter’s entrepreneurs escaping from competition by innovation. My thesis is not that democratic states “must” all end up doing this, but rather that a built-in totalitarian bias should be taken as a symptom of their rationality.
Autonomy of action in the passage from democracy to totalitarianism need not be regained in a single unbroken move, planned in advance. It is, at least initially, more like sleep-walking than conscious progress towards a clearly perceived goal. Chapter 5, “State Capitalism,” deals with the cumulative policies likely to carry the state step by step along the road to “self-fulfilment.” Their effect is so to change the social system as to maximize the potential for discretionary power, and to enable the state fully to realize this potential.
The agenda for increasing discretionary power (“What Is to Be Done?”) must first address the problem of decreasing civil society’s autonomy and capacity for withholding consent. The policies the democratic state managing a “mixed economy” tends to drift into will unwittingly erode a large part of the basis of this autonomy, the independence of people’s livelihoods. What the Communist Manifesto calls “the winning of the battle of democracy” in order “to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state” is the completion of this process. The socialist state thus puts an end to the historical and logical freak of economic power being diffused throughout civil society while political power is centralized. In centralizing and unifying the two powers, however, it creates a social system which is inconsistent with, and cannot properly function under, the classical democratic rules of awarding tenure of state power. Social democracy must evolve into people’s democracy or the next best thing, the state now being powerful enough to enforce this development and ward off systemic breakdown.
“Systemic constants” versus the variables of the human element are considered in the context of private and state capitalism (“The State as Class”) to assess the place of the managing bureaucracy. As the thesis that separation of ownership and control really means loss of control by the owner is untenable, it must be accepted that the bureaucracy has precarious tenure and its discretionary power is limited. The nice or nasty disposition of the bureaucrats manning the state, their “socio-economic origin” and whose father went to which school, are variables, the configurations of power and dependence characterizing private and state capitalism respectively are constants; in such phrases as “socialism with a human face,” the weight of the constants of socialism relative to the variables of the human face is best seen as a matter of personal hopes and fears.
In state capitalism more inexorably than in looser social systems, one thing leads to another and, as one inconsistency is eliminated, others emerge, calling in turn for their elimination. The final and futuristic section of this book (“On the Plantation”) deals with the logic of a state which owns all capital, needing to own its workers, too. Markets for jobs and goods, consumer sovereignty, money, employee-citizens voting with their feet are alien elements defeating some of the purposes of state capitalism. To the extent that they are dealt with, the social system comes to incorporate some features of the paternalistic Old South.
People have to become
