By Sudip Bhattacharya
Having been on Medicaid, I understand that state power is not inherently unjust. Government overreach does exist and must always be countered. Yet the notion that state power can only be a vehicle of repression and violence is an extremely conservative one, even when uttered by those of us on the Left. It is politically naïve and reductive.
Not only has government power been a positive for many oppressed and marginalized groups, including working people; its ability to use force and coercion has been a necessary tool in shifting power away from the entrenched few. Taxing the rich, regulating major corporations, and redistributing land are all necessary forms of government coercion to raise living standards for the masses. These are all things that government has done in the United States and elsewhere.
In Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic work examining the Reconstruction era following the demise of chattel slavery in America, Du Bois wrote of federal government intervention in the former Confederacy and its benefits. Through its direct military occupation of the South, the federal government created space for civic and political groups organized by white progressives and African Americans for the first time in the region’s modern history. There was also the creation of federal bureaucracies, such as the Freedmen’s Bureau, that Du Bois cited as being historic. For the first time, a majority of African Americans and poor whites were finally being provided free universal schooling and healthcare.
“The Freedmen’s Bureau was the most extraordinary and far-reaching institution of social uplift that America has ever attempted,” Du Bois stated. “It was a government guardianship for the relief and guidance of white and black labor from a feudal agrarianism to modern farming and industry.”
Du Bois himself published his work on Reconstruction politics while living through the New Deal, another era that saw the federal government playing a greater role in providing resources and rights for a larger share of the American populace. It was under the New Deal that social welfare programs were finally created to offset the precarity that people faced existing in a so-called free market world where companies could hire and fire whomever and whenever they wanted. It was also through the New Deal that the right to unionize was protected against corporate zealotry and overreach.
Social security and unemployment insurance were created, followed by a more emboldened Internal Revenue Service focusing on corporate returns. Not to mention the federal government decades later, pushed by grassroots efforts, to take a more serious interventionist role in protecting the rights and freedoms of African Americans and other marginalized groups against white terror. One could argue more coercive means should’ve been used, with more Klansmen being arrested and disappeared, as well as white supremacists who chose to wear suits rather than robes to their meetings. The prison system should’ve been filled with racists and their sympathizers.
Why is it so important to have this broader view of government power and its benefits? Because this view enriches us, providing a clearer analysis of how to generate power and change for the working masses. It also reminds us that the era we’re in remains an era of narrowed political interests and horizons. Biden or Trump, government functions as a vehicle for private capitalist interests to grow fat and ever more looming over the rest of society.
The Biden administration has been more open to ideas such as the right to unionize, and yet, it still resists any real attempts at utilizing government institutions, which it could, to seize more power from the major capitalists that render our society a swamp for their own profit motive and greed. In a capitalist society such as ours, state power includes that of capitalist institutions, along with civic associations and groups. Government competes with capitalists who concentrate the distribution of goods and services within their grasp. After all, when wanting more housing or healthcare, where do we turn to? The government? Perhaps when we need some kind of reprieve. But usually, we are dependent upon the private insurance company or landlord for our salvation, for what we need to live. We depend on a job to access scraps and crumbs.
As Kevin Young, Michael Schwartz, and Tarun Banerjee state, “Capitalists routinely exert leverage over governments by withholding the resources — jobs, credit, goods, and services — upon which society depends.” During the Obama administration, even when tepid reforms and regulations were pushed ahead, major businesses responded by withholding critical investments that would cause the economy to become far more precarious for a growing segment of the population because they had the power to do so. “The ‘capital strike’ might take the form of layoffs, offshoring jobs and money, denying loans, or just a credible threat to do those things, along with a promise to relent once government delivers the desired policy changes,” Young, Schwartz, and Bannerjee add.
When COVID became our enduring reality, the medical industry had been caught flat-footed. In a saner society, not one dominated by profit-hungry entities called companies, there would’ve been a stockpile of masks and other medical resources in case of emergency, especially as pandemics become more commonplace.
However, most major companies were uninterested in having an excess of masks, depreciating assets whose value was only speculative. Money is far more important than saving lives, of course.
“But executives in the medical supply industry said that while they are rushing to accelerate their output of face masks, it could take months to ramp up,” it was reported at the time, as body bags lined the streets of Manhattan, as the medical industry staggered through the crisis to meet critical demand at basically the last second, leading to countless needless infections and deaths. Imagine if the healthcare industry was not an industry at all but rather part of a national system. Imagine the experts who could’ve predicted the need for a stockpile of masks. Imagine that stockpile being available the moment people start feeling their chests get muddy, their breathing cut short.
As Donald Cohen and Aillen Mikaelian note in their dissection of neoliberal privatization, the government, especially at the federal level, could and should step in, not just in terms of regulating major industries but providing an actual public option of many goods and services that people need. Why keep such important goods, like housing and health, in the supposed care of a select few major corporations, and landlords? These are things that all people need, not the same as choosing between what cereal or TV show to purchase/binge.
“If we take back control of our public goods — if we reject what political philosopher Michael Sandel calls ‘a market society’ — we will gain an incredible opportunity to build instead a society based on public values and a commitment to ensuring that public goods are available to all,” they explain in The Privatization of Everything, adding, “We’re all better off when we limit privatization and market competition over things we all need — things including public health, key infrastructure, water, education, and democracy itself.”
After the Russian Civil War, which saw an army of proto-fascists and fanatics unleashed onto the Russian working classes and peasantry, Vladimir Lenin, the great theoretician of the “state,” believed that having some level of government bureaucracy was necessary in forging the transition from a country ruined by war and capitalism toward something more oriented toward the needs and interests of the masses. Of course, the government bureaucrats would be accountable to the various levels of revolutionary pressure, from the Bolshevik party to members of the working class and peasantry who understood their historic role inside the country.
Nevertheless, much like Du Bois, Lenin embraced the realpolitik of government institutions being capable and willing to coerce the ruling elite and to forge a society that finally abolished class distinctions itself. There was much work to be done, according to him.
“Our society is one which has left the rails of capitalism, but has not yet got on to new rails,” he stated in an essay collected in The Day after the Revolution, “The state in this society is not ruled by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat. We refuse to understand that when we say ‘state’ we mean ourselves, the proletariat, the vanguard of the working class.”
People can certainly exist in a future society in which they care for each other and check in on those around them in terms of what neighbors might need. People have that capacity to perform mutual aid. However, none of that individual or hyper-local level of care negate the fact that a society still needs major institutions to function for people to truly feel liberated, from the maintenance of hospitals (no longer run for profit) to schooling (also free and universal) to, of course, such institutions filled with a level of expertise, whether its medical or educational or the ability to maintain the traffic lights at the nearest intersection, that not everyone should be expected to have. Is it really a liberated society in which everyone, regardless of their interests or capacity, is expected to produce and provide asthma inhalers and other types of medicine for those around them? Is it liberation for everyone to have to spend every day gathering food and other resources so that everyone can survive?
This is where Big Government intervenes, cultivating people and institutions that respond to our needs so that we’re truly free and less burdened overall. Or, as Jodi Dean has said regarding the masses and the party form, channeling and developing peoples’ skills and energies far higher than simply being obsessed with the extremely local. We need a world that’s free. We are against capitalist forces imposing their nightmare upon us — a nightmare that’s global in reach.
Now, questions do remain of how to create that government we so desperately need. One could argue somehow that all we must do is run candidates, possibly independent of major parties, and for them to simply “take over” existing institutions. To some degree, this is indeed important — at least in the short term when it means providing and tweaking policies that could improve peoples’ lives, such as appointing officials sympathetic to labor to the NLRB or hiring more IRS officials to pursue white-collar tax dodging, or at a more visceral level, providing free money to people during a pandemic.
And yet, Lenin’s insight that the state or particularly government power doesn’t automatically change simply because there’s an immediate changing of the guard also holds true. In the United States, even as the government is reoriented to be more perhaps, “sympathetic”, toward interests beyond the elite, it remains a network of institutions situated to sustain capitalism, and other forms of oppression. Even the New Deal itself, as much as it curried favor and improved peoples’ lives tremendously, was itself a “compromise” between workers and their employes, and hence, sought a friendlier version of capitalism, well-regulated of course, to survive, which it did until more extremist elements of the capitalist class demanded more in terms of government largesse and power.
There will need to be a dramatic break with how government is currently oriented to truly meet the political aspirations and dreams of most people. It will be a government that does more than just tax the wealthy but abolishes them. It will be a government that does more than create programs to achieve balance but rather completely redistributes land and wealth, completely addresses historical wrongs from the dispossession of indigenous groups to the ghosts of enslavement, to paying money and making amends to the recent victims of the War on Drugs, and militarized policing.
This break necessitates revolution, always. There still is a need for a revolutionary party to break through the white noise of our status quo politics, and gather our forces to confront and challenge, and reinvent. There is still that need for more than just simply running candidates for re-election, no matter how radical platforms may seem.
But one can’t sustain without the other. Shorter-term needs get met, and longer-term horizons expand. People become emboldened as they win, not when they lose everything, including their sense of self and sanity.
Whatever the path toward political synergy might be, it cannot be wedded to an analysis of government and state power that is not only reductive, but stinks of political immaturity and a form of libertarian analysis that only sees government as somehow oppressive and all forms of “independence” from it as liberatory.“One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair,” Du Bois had written regarding the violent defeat and the shutting down of progress at the tail end of the Reconstruction period. Similarly, as much as people are being immiserated and, in some instances, compelled to take on a more radical opposition or critique, we also have seen a rise in rightwing violence and a predilection amongst the capitalist classes to express antipathy and throwing obstacles against any form of progressive reform even. Both the Democratic and Republican parties, with different levels of intensity, are very much against the cries of the oppressed and the dreams of the politically voiceless. The working classes who envision a socialist world have no real political home, let alone political momentum at this point.
Crises beget more crises, which beget the oppressed and exploited being overwhelmed and politically confused. Big Government is an answer, and yet, who or what will spread the gospel and make it heaven on earth before the waters rise above our knees?
