We can and should do this without the tyranny of the State.
The act of managing capital is statecraft.
I’m not a water treatment engineer, but I am an engineer, and I don’t need nor want a cop or similar authoritarian and hierarchical structure breathing down my neck to organize complex technological systems with the continuous consent of the community.
You need mechanisms for uniform and consistent management which can be established and reproduced from individual to individual and generation to generation. Any bureaucracy involved in that labor is going to function as a state. Without that bureaucracy, the capital will fail, the economy will flounder, and the public will turn to infighting over increasingly scare resources.
I tend to consider the two key characteristics of a state to be the claim to the right to demand tax, and the claim to the exclusive use of violence. The definition of statecraft as the act of managing capital is a formulation I have not heard before, and doesn’t strike me as persuasive. It seems to have strange implications, like that Goldman Sachs is a state.
Your arguments here seem more in support of institutions than states. Asking whether one can have capable municipal water service without a state is a different question than whether one can have capable municipal water service without institutions. The necessity of institutions in this case seems an easier argument.
two key characteristics of a state to be the claim to the right to demand tax, and the claim to the exclusive use of violence.
I think the first runs afoul of the Tragedy of the Commons. If you don’t have some mechanism for collecting surplus and redistributing it between people, then you end up with individualist overuse/overconsumption or private aggregation of property through superior economic position. You need some kind of redistribution system to mitigate social risk and negative externalities on property. And that typically comes as an explicit or implicit tax on private earnings.
I’ll spot you the second… kinda. Because at a national level, its definitely true that exclusive right to violence gives dictatorial power to the chief executive. But, at the same time, at a given regional level you’re always going to have some professionalized or majoritarian superior force with very limited tolerance for competition. If you look at Yugoslavia following the collapse of the USSR, you see what happens when a single unified federal system is allowed (arguably encouraged) to Balkinize into a bunch of roughly-equal groups of ethnic groups pitted against one another for increasingly scare resources. The civil war in the Balkins effectively cleared the way for NATO to capture and reconsolidate Yugoslavia under a single EU banner-head. Anarchists traded Titoism for Merkel-entialism.
Asking whether one can have capable municipal water service without a state is a different question than whether one can have capable municipal water service without institutions.
The public at-large needs a functioning water service in order to operate as a cohesive municipality. But a series of professionalized water service providers offers a leverage point from which administrators can exert authority over the public at-large (by deciding who does and does not have access to cheap potable water).
So you need a proletarian lead administration to oversee the professional water services. You can’t just bank on the water services management to be unambitious indefinitely. Or immune to corruption or greed or intimidation.
Your arguments here seem more in support of institutions than states.
Institutions are the foundation upon which a state is built. Once you establish - say - a professional military, you’ve kicked open the door for a military dictatorship. Once you establish a professional financial sector, you’ve invited monopolistic banking interests. Even trade unions ultimately establish economic choke points through which power can consolidate and violence can be centralized. Just ask anyone in the mobbed up corners of Southern Europe or Latin America.
At some point, you cannot forego a dictatorship of the proletariat without paving the way for a dictatorship of the bourgeois.
The act of managing capital is statecraft.
You need mechanisms for uniform and consistent management which can be established and reproduced from individual to individual and generation to generation. Any bureaucracy involved in that labor is going to function as a state. Without that bureaucracy, the capital will fail, the economy will flounder, and the public will turn to infighting over increasingly scare resources.
I tend to consider the two key characteristics of a state to be the claim to the right to demand tax, and the claim to the exclusive use of violence. The definition of statecraft as the act of managing capital is a formulation I have not heard before, and doesn’t strike me as persuasive. It seems to have strange implications, like that Goldman Sachs is a state.
Your arguments here seem more in support of institutions than states. Asking whether one can have capable municipal water service without a state is a different question than whether one can have capable municipal water service without institutions. The necessity of institutions in this case seems an easier argument.
I think the first runs afoul of the Tragedy of the Commons. If you don’t have some mechanism for collecting surplus and redistributing it between people, then you end up with individualist overuse/overconsumption or private aggregation of property through superior economic position. You need some kind of redistribution system to mitigate social risk and negative externalities on property. And that typically comes as an explicit or implicit tax on private earnings.
I’ll spot you the second… kinda. Because at a national level, its definitely true that exclusive right to violence gives dictatorial power to the chief executive. But, at the same time, at a given regional level you’re always going to have some professionalized or majoritarian superior force with very limited tolerance for competition. If you look at Yugoslavia following the collapse of the USSR, you see what happens when a single unified federal system is allowed (arguably encouraged) to Balkinize into a bunch of roughly-equal groups of ethnic groups pitted against one another for increasingly scare resources. The civil war in the Balkins effectively cleared the way for NATO to capture and reconsolidate Yugoslavia under a single EU banner-head. Anarchists traded Titoism for Merkel-entialism.
The public at-large needs a functioning water service in order to operate as a cohesive municipality. But a series of professionalized water service providers offers a leverage point from which administrators can exert authority over the public at-large (by deciding who does and does not have access to cheap potable water).
So you need a proletarian lead administration to oversee the professional water services. You can’t just bank on the water services management to be unambitious indefinitely. Or immune to corruption or greed or intimidation.
Institutions are the foundation upon which a state is built. Once you establish - say - a professional military, you’ve kicked open the door for a military dictatorship. Once you establish a professional financial sector, you’ve invited monopolistic banking interests. Even trade unions ultimately establish economic choke points through which power can consolidate and violence can be centralized. Just ask anyone in the mobbed up corners of Southern Europe or Latin America.
At some point, you cannot forego a dictatorship of the proletariat without paving the way for a dictatorship of the bourgeois.