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Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]
- Автор: Эткинд Александр Маркович
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wiley
- Переводчик: Sara Jolly
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]». Краткое содержание книги:
The parasitic state
In 1740, a Prussian prince wrote a short book entitled Anti-Machiavel . He explained that the task of the sovereign is not to seek glory or fill the treasury but to create a common good – the flourishing of his people. But when this author became Frederick the Great, he encountered various difficulties. The sovereign wants the common good, the elite is fixated on wealth, the people aspire to survive. The forms of redistribution, however, depend on the available resources. It is easier to tax grain than potatoes, bank accounts than gold. In 1917, the revolution in Russia abolished the old currency, but there was still grain stored in barns and gold in money boxes; the new state wished to confiscate them – naturally, in the name of the common good. Requisitions of grain were made by armed units, but gold and jewellery were easier to conceal from them, and a more creative strategy was practised. The government launched the chain of state-owned pawn shops known as Torgsin and invited the citizens to exchange gold for bread. The same intelligence officers who in the 1920s had engaged in the export of hemp and furs (see chapter 3 ) switched to extracting gold from the population. During the famine, these pawn shops made handsome profits. In desperation, people in the provinces had to buy food at the unheard-of prices that were fixed by officials in Moscow. The people’s gold was used to buy factories and technology – Torgsin paid for a third of the imports which were necessary for Stalin’s industrialisation. 6 Hunger created profit for the treasury and was used for the ‘development’ of the country. This is an extreme example of the mercantile pump, in which the interest of the sovereign was directly opposite to the prosperity of the people. But states have always and everywhere spread the fiction that their interests were as one with the common good.
The world in which capitalism flourished in the nineteenth and early twentieth century was not very different from the world of Herodotus. Distant colonies supplied the imperial centres with their exotic materials, while the ruling nations created wealth from labour and knowledge. But the mass society also created something genuinely new: the enrichment of the masses was a condition for the success of the state. Neither Xerxes nor the imperial mercantilists knew such things. Although the growth of the imperial trade in sugar, cotton or opium depended on the trickling down of these former luxuries to the egalitarian masses, classical debates overlooked mass consumption as the engine of growth. The second Industrial Revolution revealed a deep paradox of the new economy: wealth rushes towards conspicuous consumption but is formed by the mass market. 7 Luxury items – for example cars – bring about economic growth only when they become cheap enough to be affordable by the majority. For the Founding Fathers, the measure of the American dream was the number of acres per household; for the Fordists, it was the number of cars on the drive.
Optimists took the new correspondence between the interests of the people and the interests of the state as a universal law of the new era; in fact, it was a temporary blip which did not survive beyond the middle of the twentieth century. Simon Kuznets, the American economist of Belarusian origin, believed that, with economic growth, income inequality first increases and then decreases. 8 In 1971, he received the Nobel Prize for Economics, and ‘the Kuznets curve’ – an arc showing the relation between the growth of national economics and the inequality of citizen’s incomes – has graced many textbooks. But all of us – global citizens and particles of Gaia – are still waiting for the downward turn of this curve. Refuting Keynes’s belief that inequality leads to fixed capital investment, inequality is greater but the investment in infrastructure is less in the early twenty-first century than it was in the second half of the twentieth century. Every year, national elites consume ever larger shares of material resources, energy and air. Globally, inequality is growing even faster than warming, and contributes to it. Soviet socialism is a thing of the past, but so is American Fordism. The post-Cold War elites have stopped investing in the illusion of their usefulness; the age of cynical reason has begun. Tired of creating myths, the most powerful people on the planet have rejected reality.
In a labour-intensive economy there are limits to inequality; in a resource-dependent economy, monopolies grow without limit, and so does inequality. A state which is a monopoly producer of raw material, or is part of a cartel of such producers, has no reason to support justice, competition and the rule of law. Such a state does not depend on taxes and thus does not depend on the population. On the contrary, the population depends on the state. Its bureaucracy redistributes wealth, reserving a generous helping for itself. Political commentators have tried out different names for this type of state: the rentier state, the neopatrimonial state, the Mafia state, the kleptocratic state, the super-extractive state … In this competition to find a fitting name for disaster, my choice is ‘the parasitic state’. The original Greek meaning of the word ‘parasite’, today familiar from its use in medicine, was a ‘hanger-on’; it is time to return this useful word to the social sciences. * The parasitic state is a political community which maintains the attributes of a state but fails to fulfil its functions. In my view, parasitism is the extreme version of mercantilism. The parasitic state retains many of the traits of the mercantile state, and in particular its focus on the growth of gold reserves thanks to the export of raw materials and the restraint on mass consumption. But unlike mercantile empires, which in their best moments realised the functions of the state within their metropolitan lands (but of course not in the colonies), the parasitic state fails to meet these functions even for its own population. Public goods are unavailable or a fiction, social capital deteriorates, people and money flee the country. Instead of the old imperial ‘progress’ we see the triumph of archaic beliefs, demodernisation and decay.
Depending on the chosen resource, the parasitic state forms under specific conditions. First, such a state relies on a primary commodity, which liberates it from dependence on labour and people. Second, this commodity must be topical, not diffused, thus providing this state with the opportunity for a monopoly price formation, alone or with a cartel of its peers. Third, the commodity must be addictive, thus promising an unlimited growth in demand. In such a state, the population is superfluous, as Hannah Arendt put it in her study of colonial and totalitarian societies. 9 Such a society cannot say to its government, ‘no taxation without representation’. Once the key enterprises require relatively little labour, the workers cannot go on strike. If the wealth of the nation doesn’t depend on the labour and knowledge of the people, health services and education become irrelevant for the national economy. Instead of being a source of national wealth, the people become recipients of state charity. In this parasitic biopolitics the population wastes away or fails to thrive, not because of a policy of deliberate extermination but due to endemic neglect. The more the state relies on natural resources, the less it invests in human capital; the lower the level of human capital, the more such a state depends on its resource extraction. The circle is vicious.