How do you feel about protection rackets? Go on, be honest. The phrase conjures up images in your mind of burly, swarthy men in pin-striped suits with pick-axe handles, doesn’t it? Smashing up your small enterprise, making you an offer you can’t refuse and breaking your legs if you do.
Well, I’ve got some bad news for you: the concept of the protection racket provides the basis for our entire society and has done for about five or six thousand years.
I’m talking about The State, obviously. Whether it’s Bronze Age priest-kings, medieval monarchs or the modern nation state, ever since we first devolved – or, more correctly, abrogated – certain responsibilities for collective security to the putative alpha males in our ranks, we’ve been suckered by a succession of protection rackets, pure and simple.
The terms of the contract itself are pretty straightforward: in return for certain privileges, such as veneration or taxes, the alphas offer us protection from external threats. However, as is often the way with these things, the contract developed an internal dynamic of its own and became more and more one-sided.
That’s why The State, viewed dispassionately, is little more than an institutionalised atrocity. It’s licenced to behave in ways that would never be granted to any individual citizen: it extorts, it bullies, it hectors, it terrorises, it kidnaps, it imprisons and it murders.
Worse still, and particularly with regard to that last example, it presents these actions as entirely good and, moreover, admirable and then fetishises them into sordid little death cults such as patriotism or nationalism.
That’s one way of looking at it, but apart from the old anarchists, and Karl Marx’s vague promise that The State would eventually “wither away”, I can’t think of any currently active political movements which advocate dumping The State altogether. Which is odd, because for more than 30 years, both here and in America, the right-wing has had it in for The State.
The point, however, is that they remain highly selective in their anti-statism. What they hate are the good parts of the protection racket: that is, the idea of protection in its widest sense; the protection of the citizen from poverty, inequality, power or the depredations wrought on them by the rapacity of other alpha males in the private sector. For the record, that includes sabre-toothed tigers, robber barons and Rupert Murdoch.
So when Margaret Thatcher notoriously stated that there was no such thing as society, you sure as hell knew that that didn’t include The State and she had no intention of dismantling the system which gave her the power to prosecute civil servants, fix the economy to wage class war or permit The State to stockpile weapons of mass destruction.
Likewise, the Republicans in America may well howl and bay at the moon over healthcare reform, insisting that The State, in seeking to provide adequate healthcare for all its citizens, is just a jackboot’s step away from a new Gulag, but these are the same people who worship The State like a god although, naturally enough, only when it allows them to kidnap and murder and compel their fellow citizens into the narrowest imaginable spectrum of personal behaviour.
Which is more or less as you’d expect it to be, mind-bogglingly self-contradictory irony being the wattle and daub of most politics. But it’s instructive, in its death throes, to reflect on how “new” Labour got snookered by the same ironies.
Although the governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did use The State for good, redistributing income and protecting the citizen far more effectively than the Thatcherite anti-statism they otherwise embraced, they did so in a bad, statist way.
Top-down, it never empowered the people; worse, it gleefully failed to rein in the power of the already powerful until it was almost too late; even then, The State was used to buttress the power of the failed banks rather than batter it down.
So, while I suppose we’ll have to get used to the sight of the various rivals for state power boasting about how much they’ll withdraw the protection of The State from its citizens, we shouldn’t forget the way Labour used The State in the only way left to it (apart from the imprisoning and murdering bit).
“New” Labour’s “new” Britain has more surveillance cameras than any other Western nation. The powerful in the private sector, from whom The State should have been protecting us, were apparently so feeble they couldn’t bear the weight of too much regulation, so instead the rest of us have to be constantly monitored to make sure we mind our Ps and Qs.
Well, I’m afraid I won’t be in Brighton to enjoy the spectacle of the security state in its pomp. I’ve got some paint to watch dry instead. But pity The State that thinks it’s worth watching, too.
