It is finished.^[1] All over the world, nature and people have been turned into productive forces of capital. In every last corner of the earth there are character masks of capital at work, as well as masses of people dependent on growth and coping with their more or less useful poverty. Business and power are incessantly making sure every aspect of life is subsumed under the need to multiply money; competition drives the key actors to make constant reforms. So that everywhere they keep finding positive conditions for that indispensable growth.

These efforts not only produce a considerable number of victims, who are cataloged by the media with the necessary differentiation. They also keep those responsible too busy to notice the contradictions and limits inherent in what they are doing. Even when they take note of an economic crisis, i.e., diagnose a general slump in business, all they know is that someone has spoiled their business conditions for them, withheld them from them. When they address this complaint to the state in its capacity as administrator of the national business location, they seem, on the one hand, to be emphatically repeating what capitalists are always demanding from states as their service providers. On the other hand, these demands are reminding the rulers of something quite different. In view of the internationalization of business — which they themselves are driving — they also need the capital operating under other sovereigns to be suitable as a source of their power. While capitalists and speculators are mobile enough to show favor to whatever locations serve their business, the sovereigns this puts to the test attend to their peers’ statecraft, granting it respect while trying to influence and control it. In this sector, capital acts as an instrument of the nation, and the nation’s credit as a weapon, while the nation’s weapons procure credit.

§ 25 The right to growth and its means: a right that is vested but insufficiently realized

The capitalists’ competitive success stands or falls with their nation’s imperialist qualities. For when everything is done — domestic society has been put in proper order and the world made over to allow capitalist wealth to grow in each country — nothing is actually done yet. All the legitimate questions and demands the economically dominant class has — i.e., its claim to succeed — are still open, or now really open. This is expressed in no uncertain terms by its criticism, the hard core and ultimate truth of all dissatisfaction that goes along with the capitalists’ business activities from the very beginning. Namely: it is all well and good that nature and society have been made into a resource for their enrichment; but there are doubts whether this will work out as it should; and these doubts are obviously aggravated when well-engineered deals fail and economic crisis ultimately sets in. Money invested is always at risk if not in danger of being entirely lost. The state has empowered the movers and shakers of the economy to make use of the world as their business area, freeing them from the barriers to growth that the state’s own limited size presents. But in doing so, it has made it necessary for them to compete against their peers all over the world. It supports them with its means — its law and its budget — in their efforts to grow and keep growing and growing; but has thereby made their clout dependent on its own balances and on reckonings of national and international scope which even large corporate concerns cannot control. In short, state power puts their profiteering in the right, but whether they make a profit is up in the air.

The reason for this dissatisfaction is plain and simple: all the conditions for competition that the state provides are just that and no guarantee of success. And that is the whole criticism that representatives of the capitalist class raise in view of this experience, and that bourgeois public opinion can only agree with. What they are judging is the commercial success of the nation measured against the demand that everything must succeed; and this demand is usually not realized — and never truly realized — by the actual results, regardless of whether they are determined statistically or extrapolated with a particular bias, summarized overall or presented using appropriately selected individual examples. The yardstick is not the more or less suitable means that state power provides for its economy to operate with; the yardstick is the standpoint that if the supreme power is dutifully doing everything it can to properly serve the country and its wealth, and not afraid of creating victims, then it must really make sure it all pays off. The crucial question for the nation is, where do WE stand in the world of states and in the critical judgment of world history? Reports about political efforts and interim results are no answer: the nation wants to see success.

Capitalist growth, on the national level: the material substance and purpose of states’ fight for their sovereignty

State power shares this standpoint and demand; and gives it imperialist substance. After all, by working to give its capitalist bourgeoisie free access to domestic resources and those of the world, it has been deliberately and purposefully not merely serving one prominent, separate interest, but making its society’s labor and life and its own material existence dependent on its national business location standing its ground in international competition for capitalist growth. Successful enrichment of the dominant class is not a state concern that can be separated or even meaningfully distinguished from the common good; it is the basis of existence for the people and for rule; it is what first and foremost makes for secure national sovereignty. So when the capitalist class justifies its right to success and calls for the government to guarantee it while claiming it is only pursuing its own interests for the nation’s sake, this is more than hypocrisy — or it is hypocrisy that hits the nail on the head.

However, the state is likewise hitting the nail on the head when it, conversely, spells out to capitalists that the true substance and ultimate purpose of their successful market-economy growth is its own overall success in the contest of strength between nations, and when it enlists them to serve that purpose against their specific private interests. For the state sees global business life as the civil arena for its competition against its peers to overcome the contradiction that the internationalization of capitalist business life confronts it with. It needs the world of states as the source of the growth it lives on; it makes use of them to that end in accordance with its claims for success. In the process, it makes itself dependent on other countries being able to satisfy its interests and willing to satisfy the rights it claims. This contradiction between needing to make use of other sovereigns and being dependent on them is the decisive challenge for the state. It must face up to this challenge; it has to overcome it in the service of its national capitalism using the power it has over its business location and the power it gains from ruling over it. In the final analysis, whenever it intervenes in its country’s political economy it is not only out to meet the economy’s intrinsic needs but at the same time out to control the conditions of existence for its rule. In individual cases the government will of course always be taking account of the importance it attaches to some question at issue, but as a matter of principle it is definitely after nothing less than the solidity of political power, and thus the highest of political goods: national security. What it has to do is successfully use all means of power, including the power of money, to secure sovereignty over all the conditions the state makes its material existence dependent on.

The resulting list of tasks includes, firstly, politically controlling free global markets where the competition between the champions of capitalist growth is decided (§ 26). Guaranteeing suitable freedom of the markets requires, secondly, an apparatus of force that prevents the state’s freedom of action from being obstructed in any way within its borders, and spells out the nation’s vital interests to the rest of the world, if necessary by way of military deterrence (§ 27). This kind of security is the basis, thirdly, for turning the boon of international credit business into a civilian fight to take the capitalist means of existence from foreign countries, a fight that is largely decided in advance but must nevertheless be fought with caution in normal cases and quite rigidly in exceptional cases (§ 28). This fight, fourthly, makes the cost of freedom for all countries an acid test that can call into question their established raison d'état in domestic affairs, and in foreign affairs makes it necessary for some to overturn the prevailing power relations, and for others to monopolize world-ordering power (§ 29). The definitive force-based relationship of complete world domination is called — fifthly — “world peace” because it defines and decrees which wars are required and what is not allowed. So it determines the ultimate cost of freedom that an imperialist state makes the world pay in order for the global system of competition between capitalists to endure (§ 30).

§ 26 The ideal market: a claim to possession with guaranteed success

It is on the world markets that the competition of capitalists is decided, and not only theirs. The national summation of their successes determines the economic growth, both in absolute terms and in relation to other nations, that a state has made itself and its country dependent on by opening its borders to capitalist business. So the capitalists’ individual and collective market success is crucial for a state's ability to survive and assert itself, and for the common good of its class society. World markets must therefore not just be spheres where companies from all over the world measure their commercial strength against each other with an open outcome (which they only do, anyway, in the minds of those who advocate and believe in free competition and a strict separation between politics and business). It is imperative that they be shaped by state power following the ideal of guaranteed success — the same ideal every capitalist basically has when staking his wealth as an advance and assuming production equals sale, and investment equals return.

When it comes to this ideal the state is in absolute agreement with its dominant class. What the state is aiming for, however, is a happy resolution of the contradiction between being dependent and having sovereign control over the conditions of its existence, the contradiction it has brought upon itself by giving its economy international reach. It accordingly surveys and handles the means the nation generates for it: as instruments for its sovereign right to assert its vital interests, the purpose being to get control of competition on the world market, to the extent that it needs this market and because it is dependent on it.

Its means are firstly the competitive successes it has enabled its economy to achieve on the world markets. This is circular, as it assumes state power has always been deployed for business both domestically and abroad, with the results being the basis for business operations. But that is how a national capitalism works, there being no more distinction between economic and political interests and capacities. Thus, the state wants, promotes, and if necessary creates competitive power through advances in technology and productivity, through monopolies and the sheer size of capital under its rule. Above and beyond the competitive successes of individual companies, it needs and pushes growth on a national scale that does not just have an impressive rate but an excessive mass for occupying world markets, and that does not just make it possible but mandatory to utilize foreign investment spheres. If the state is not just complying with an uncontrollable force of circumstance, but rather maintaining its freedom to choose its economic partners around the world entirely according to its own advantage, it is coming pretty close to its ideal of guaranteed success for its nation’s use of the world market. For its complementary efforts to make its own territory interesting if not irresistible to foreign capitalists and other states, not just the quantity of accumulating wealth but the sheer mass of basically available sources of wealth again proves to be an essential factor for comparing the quality of nations. If the capitalistic utilization is already more or less across the board, but even if it is only envisaged and possible and beginning, a high population figure will be chalked up as a productive force and buying power, increasing the quality of the economic power available to the state and its ability to impact global trade flows. Large masses of actual and potential proletarians and consumers are not merely attractive, they cannot be ignored by the capitalists of the world, so that the interests of the state ruling them cannot be ignored by other states either.

Everything like this that a state can chalk up as its claim to global economic possession, it uses as its means of competition. Its first aim is to establish all its capitalists’ international achievements to date as its right. This is the first guideline an imperialist state power follows for all agreements to open up free world-trade at all. The associated second guideline is to launch a diplomatic political attack on all successes the other parties have achieved and claim as their right. None of the stuff or methods of commercial dealings between nations is left to any kind of self-acting free competition. At the start, states influence the prices that goods are traded at between nations, and fight over them bilaterally and multilaterally — resulting in the famous terms of trade. When it comes to raw materials, the negotiation of prices is actually a trial of strength between producing countries essentially wanting to cash in on their exclusive power of disposal over their natural resources, and importing nations having the buying power and industries without which such resources cannot be turned into capitalist wealth. As for capitalistically produced goods from businesses in different countries competing with each other, there are disputes about how comparable they are, and standards for quality and other features are set that competition must adapt to. In addition, specifications are issued for cost-effective techniques and conditions of production that have to be adhered to, including rules for methods of determining relevant criteria and data. This is where the old concept of protective tariffs finds multiple uses, especially by the most advanced countries, to prevent their social or environmental laws from ending up favoring foreign producers who do not have to suffer under the burden of such considerations. Between industrialized nations of equal rank it is especially important to standardize countless details of products and manufacturing processes to make sure foreign goods are at a disadvantage and one’s own are protected from discrimination. And before it gets ugly, rules must of course be found to define controversial views. Regulation and deregulation are instruments for dominating world markets in lawful form, which is what states are after. For their tough battles on this civilian front, they enter into alliances, with mutual obligations and joint arrangements for discriminating against third parties, to the point of barring unwelcome competition from common markets through quite objective measures such as approval procedures and other “non-tariff trade barriers.” Such things are not merely a service to privileged companies, but weapons for politically controlling the world markets, where details of the omnipresent question of national success are at stake on a daily basis. This does not wipe out the ideal of free trade. It exists in the elegant form of most-favored-nation status which trading nations grant each other. The practical application of this “clause” — the reality of non-discriminatory world trade — consists in arbitration courts that have to decide on the consequences of treaty infringements. Obviously this makes the courts themselves — their composition and their competences — an important subject of dispute between the parties who are out to get their unilateral benefit but require consensus among each other for getting it. This imperialist contradiction of a world-market order that is both unilaterally beneficial and consensual reaches its highest level in the World Trade Organization, which gives the perpetual dispute between the mighty over the control of world trade the form of a globally valid legal order. In reality, this order depends on its members’ very unequally distributed blackmail potential, so it organizes their constant testing of their strength. This, too, is done with the help of arbitration courts that function as well as suits the real makers and shakers of world markets.

In addition, an imperialistically active state builds up and expands its material power of disposal over trade and commerce on a global scale; with everything its wealth permits. It builds trade routes (ports, canals, pipelines); not just because its global traders need them and ask for them, but in order to establish and secure its dominance over global trade, present and future, with a worldwide infrastructure that is its own, and even if privatized will remain its political property or at least under its protection. This includes global information and payment systems that connect the major financial markets with each other and with the rest of the world, along with undersea cables and satellites, technology and receiving stations, hardware and software. All of this of course only benefits the interests of an imperialist state to the extent that its rivals go along with it. So it all functions only as well as the other nations are, for their purposes, dependent on being networked under the direction of the leading powers. In any case, providing a service for global business life means having real control over the other states that are active on the world markets as the prime movers of their nation’s capitalism.

The credit money of nations is both — without differentiation — the real overall balance of a nation’s capitalism in the form in which this balance is directly available to the state, and the means and the measure of all means that it can have at its disposal. It is the stuff that embodies the nation’s business success as a right, i.e., as the right to lay hold of the wealth of the world. This makes it at the same time the material power to create all the facilities that states need for their business dealings. The quality of this money summarizes, objectifies, and quantifies the global trading states’ claim to possession, as well as the guarantee of success contained therein, which is in reality very conditional.

The power of good money, the legally proper grip on the course of world trade, and the material productive force of the countries that keep the world markets going technically, all come together in exemplary fashion in the imperialist powers’ competition to dominate the world market for energy — the absolutely indispensable material means for all nations’ business and existence. And the three come together especially clearly in these powers’ struggle to change from fossilized raw materials to industrially produced energy sources. This is, after all, pretty crucial to the future capitalist fate of global trading nations. Which is why “human-caused climate change” is being so emphatically cited, like an irrefutable objective necessity, for the purposes of diplomatic persuasion and for agreements intended to commit the entire world of states to new industrial policy objectives to the desired end. It is also why totally overhauling this branch of business at home is a prominent case from the list of tasks the state has to cope with inside its location for capital in its fight for world-market success. Quite in general, however, the government has to put the national economy, with its productive force and its overaccumulated wealth, in a position, and gear it, to have preferably a determining influence on capitalist progress in the world, along with all its consequences for world trade and its state agents. It is not enough just to ride out the demands. The demands themselves are ones that those in charge already face when serving the legitimate interests of their capitalist class, whose representatives do not fail to point them out. But the nations’ fight for their vital interests that are at stake in world market competition makes it absolutely necessary for them to do everything they can to ensure progress and competitive power with guaranteed success on their own territory. That is what a class society has to break world records for, transforming its everyday life and way of working as needed, and altogether putting up with anything and everything. State power has no use for any sand in the works,^[*] not to mention something like resistance.

Here the nation must not make any compromises. It is confronted with the question of how well disciplined its citizens are and how stable its rule is within its borders, and how able it is to fight enemies outside them.

§ 27 The condition for everything: Sovereign power

In order for state power to be able to perform its service to the nation’s capital growth and for market domination the way the nation’s interests require, it must be concerned unconditionally with itself. It must make sure its sovereignty over its people is unassailable at home; and its political will is respected abroad by the governments of the countries whose performance it has made its economy, and therefore itself, dependent on. This necessity gives the contradictory relationship between the state and capital its final form: in order to promote the definitive success of its dominant class, the state must emancipate itself from this class’s claims to profit, more broadly, from its competitive society’s separate interests that it puts into effect and carefully guards. This it must do, not by negating them, but so as to exploit its citizens’ self-interest and economic success for its sovereign power. This contradiction requires that the state specifically consider and act upon the relation of rule as such, i.e., the relation between political power and bourgeois freedom. In a corresponding way, in relations with the nation’s foreign trading and business partners, a primary object of political concern becomes the ‘balance’ of power as such — the constant theoretical, and the practical, comparison of power with the other sovereign administrators of national business locations.

Sovereign power within the state’s borders
The state with its laws and budget: Beneficiary and victim of the service it provides

In order to function, a competitive capitalist society needs an ordering power on a higher level. It needs a ruling apparatus that serves all opposing interests, i.e., no one separate interest as such; a supreme authority that demands submission from all parties and actors in the competitive struggle of bourgeois society. As the source of the power the bourgeois state needs for acting as this authority and enforcing general obedience, it utilizes its citizens’ money-making competition, meaning, in practical terms, the growth of capitalist wealth that is driven by the self-interest specific to this system. This brand of growth is what it draws on, so it needs it. But for the same reason it also needs more than a mass of subjects forced into mere submission: its power depends on citizens identifying its materially demanding sovereign regime with their own personal competitive interest, their unleashed money-making materialism. Thus, the obedience it demands of its people is no simple thing: it must be voluntary, like a service in return for the service the public power provides by enforcing the common good — the system of competition — against all separate interests.

This is contradictory in several respects.

The rights that the lawgiver grants the free agents of competition do not settle their conflicts of interest. On the contrary, they raise the systemically necessary material-based collisions to the higher level of disputes where victories and defeats are decided by the regulatory power provided by the state. This consists of an infinitely expandable code of law and a judicial apparatus that checks itself through a whole series of hierarchical courts. By providing this service, which, rather than clearing up the antagonism between the parties, reproduces it as a legal affair, state power makes itself a third party at the receiving end of the dissatisfaction and criticism that is inevitably stoked. Not only might its intervention be rejected by those private interests that have been put in the wrong; the parties put in the right might be displeased about their success always being conditional. For none of the interests involved in conflicts ever really coincide with the point of view of the legal order. The benefit and the imposition are in an equally contradictory relation to each other when the state wields its budget to manage its class society with the great conflicts of interest such a society involves. And things are no different when it promotes particular competitive interests within the classes and parallel societies. It stimulates all the antagonisms that are there, and creates additional disputes about who is being treated more favorably and who is being put at a disadvantage. So its support measures at the same time make for dissatisfaction and criticism that goes back and forth between those its policies are aimed at, while all sides complain about its budget management. When it acts as a tax collector taking the required budget funds from its economy, i.e., from the big fish and small fry of business, the state definitely does not make any friends among its systemically self-interested citizens, who tend to rally behind that mighty figure, the taxpayer. The same applies throughout the entire agenda of the bourgeois state’s rule of law, welfare system, and economic policy.

The services it provides thus fail to create the consent it is after. From its ruling standpoint, it recognizes by the dissatisfaction it produces that the separate interests it entitles, empowers, and restricts by its laws, promotes with budget funds, and is terribly fair about taxing, not only do not automatically coincide with the common good it takes responsibility for, they do not coincide with it at all. Those with these interests do not even agree to the power the state uses to enforce the common good. In whatever the state is doing to promote the greater good they instead seek their private benefit. From the state’s perspective, the contradiction inherent in the voluntary obedience it demands of its citizens turns into a contradiction in the service it is performing for society. That is, it is running the risk of making itself dependent on powerful, separate self-interests that it has itself empowered, on lobbies, associations, enormous corporations or trade unions, etc. It is running the risk of sacrificing the common good instead of fulfilling it, of ultimately becoming itself a victim of the private self-interest it is furthering.

No matter which angle politicians look at the problem from, the bourgeois state has no choice but to reflect critically and self-critically on its contradictory relationship to its basis. It has to turn its ruling activity to establishing and maintaining the absolutely necessary unity of the ruling authority with its citizens, making this the guiding principle of its rule — which otherwise stays the same in terms of what it is about.

Monopoly on the use of force, the people, dominant culture

The first thing the state owes its citizens, i.e., has to impose on them, is law and order. To this end, it maintains a domestic security apparatus that uses virtually inexhaustible means of force to ensure general compliance with the law. This apparatus testifies to the conflict between a political rule and a population required to be obedient in the banal elementary form of this conflict, for it is the only reason this apparatus exists. The police force is of a size and accordingly equipped so as to deal with disturbances of the peace, which the executive reckons with. However, this whole security service has not been established as a reaction to criminal exceptions to the rule of harmonious coexistence in society, but as the practical form of a message the authorities have to send their countrymen. It stands for the prohibition of private force in absolute terms, which is thus assumed to be normal in the same absolute terms. It nationalizes the relations of force that are immanent to capitalist competition. Without any qualms about thereby admitting how brutal the normal way of producing and living is that the state protects, it accordingly presents and justifies its armed monopoly on force as an indispensable condition for its citizens to be able to live together in a civilized way. But what it is aiming for is not just to deter people, to force them to respect the law and comply with it calculatingly. Without retracting any of the pressure its officers exert, it wants its intimidating monopoly on the use of force to make sense to its citizens. They are supposed to understand that it is good and right for the force used by its police to be omnipresent — which is why this force must not be excessive and citizens are given possibilities of lodging complaints. The state’s security apparatus is meant to function and be perceived as a necessary condition for civic decency, but not as the coercion that it is. It is supposed to manifest itself as what every decent citizen calls for, as help that they appreciate for everyday life. The police is the armed wing of civic morality.

Of course, this does not work by itself. Nor does the free and democratic bourgeois state expect it to. As part of its education system, which equips its young people for career competition, the state gives itself an additional educational mandate: to accustom its citizens to judging the world and themselves, their own needs and plans, in terms of what a functioning overall order demands, and to feeling responsible for a larger whole, ultimately for the very large whole nation. The state enables and encourages the bourgeois media to supply and occupy the public with all kinds of information that presupposes, serves, and thereby cements a consciousness of right and responsibility that applies to everything. When competing individuals having the same passport share the habit of regarding world events big and small as problems, and of demanding good solutions for everything, from the standpoint of a collective that is somehow recognized as important, a highly respectable “we” — ultimately the fiction of a national community — this turns them into a people that national rule can take as its basis in moral terms as well. Distinguishing this kind of population from other, foreign citizens is no longer a prosaic legal question, it is a matter of national identity, which makes the difference between belonging to a state and belonging to a people. The fact that the state is after more than just firm convictions is demonstrated by the process of naturalization, which is by no means granted to every willing foreign applicant. What is required is a declaration that must not be a reversible act of will, but stands for unconditional commitment to the state; in subjective terms, for patriotism without reservation or calculation. This is obviously difficult to objectify. Foreigners are in any case a factor of uncertainty for the state; not in terms of whether they will abide by the law, but in terms of their absolute reliability. There is no question of this with the native population, they are accordingly called on to serve when the state needs them, and it doesn’t necessarily matter if they have broken the law. It is much more doubtful that someone will answer the question of national identity properly if he belongs to a minority whose quite legal way of life deviates from the canon of recognized customs considered to be the dominant culture by a critical ruling authority and its followers. The members of some communities in the homeland of liberty can tell a thing or two about this. However, privately practiced xenophobia and racism are forbidden — it being no coincidence that such behavior is exhibited by those citizens who are particularly insistent on being free individuals who are seamlessly identical with the glory of the national collective and its power entrusted to the government. The national “we” standpoint generates its content abundantly, but not by itself. A state power intent on educating a proper people feeds their patriotic mindset the right images, especially often, extensively, even academically feeding them the past that is teleologically styled as the history of the nation.

So the bourgeois state does much to ensure that the status of right-conscious and responsible citizen and morally integrated native becomes “second nature” to the people it claims as its possession. Nevertheless, it remains suspicious. Not only does it have its judiciary and police monitor acts that violate the self-evident duty to be loyal — the German catchword for this being the acronym FDGO (Freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung, free and democratic basic order). It also maintains at least one intelligence service in charge of being suspicious of the convictions of citizens in general and civil servants in particular. It investigates the gray area of opinion-forming where speech is free but this freedom must not be abused so as to endanger freedom.

Legitimate social dissatisfaction and how it is coped with through democracy

National collectivism and moral conformism do not take care of what the freedom the state grants its citizens means for them in material terms. They must still bear the mighty conflicts of interest in competing to earn money, and the costs for these conflicts to play out properly that the state makes its people pay. It uses its laws and its budget to produce and reproduce the inescapable conflicts between the social interests that are in need of each other, and the conflict between the classes’ and competing individuals’ productive self-interest, which the state wants to have, and its costly regime over it. This contradiction is unresolvable per se. It is coped with, i.e., perpetuated, using the method of bourgeois rule, which dissolves it into a pluralism of mutually qualifying approaches that are supposed to harmonize socially relevant interests with the state power’s quite unqualified necessities and requirements. It is with programs of this kind — and the personnel advocating them — that political parties compete to take power and hold positions whose array of tasks are already given. It is thus clear that whenever all the various string-pullers and victims of capitalist competition have to accept some disadvantage and are legitimately dissatisfied, the target is not the bourgeois state and its relentless agenda but rather the parties intent on doing this job. They are to be blamed for everything deserving criticism, which is not so terribly bad since they are in charge “only” temporarily, from one election to the next. What bourgeois state rule is really about plays no part in the criticism, and not only that. Because the political parties aspire to serve this rule with their programs, this rule is not only beyond all criticism, the good works it is ostensibly pursuing are the yardstick for all criticism. They are the standard that the parties are supposed to meet to be able to prove their worth. The competing parties measure each other by it, thereby constantly, and in their election campaigns acutely, corroborating the wonderful separation between temporary rule, which is responsible for all evils and failures, and the interests of state power, which are approved as lastingly and unconditionally valid by every voting act, no matter what it is for.

By voting, voters give their unrestricted, permanent approval to state power and its interests in the form of conditional, temporary approval “merely” to a party ruling for a certain time, and this they do completely freely, performing their essential act of political freedom. They take the opportunity offered by the democratic state to let out their dissatisfaction with everything that happens to them at work and as a result of political decisions, in a way that may be pretty monosyllabic and therefore lack any definite content, but is fundamental in method and seems to be making a difference. The disappointment that regularly follows free voting is given an answer that is appropriate in every respect by the election result. The supporters of the election winner rarely actually get what they wanted in terms of their material interests, but always get what they chose to vote for, so they can blame themselves when the annoyances continue, and vow to “teach those people a lesson” at the next election. Those who voted for the losers are reliably informed by the election result that their politicized interests are in the minority and that alone makes them invalid, but invalid for absolutely good reason. And at the same time they are given the consolation that their state is still basically open to their wishes and political preferences, and only temporarily tied down to the variant of rule that won. This way of making power relative strictly by way of a method — temporarily linking it with one party’s ruling program and personnel — makes rule absolute vis-à-vis its base. At the same time it creates and guarantees the unity of leaders and people for the state, and the identity of free will and submission for the electorate.

Political movements for making corrections on the left and right

This method of using free competition between parties to establish and periodically confirm the emancipation of sovereign power from its citizens as well as its unity with them meets with two kinds of criticism in the bourgeois polity. Both are represented by parties that do not merely want to be alternatives within the pluralism of political programs, but movements: popular movements for making corrections to the purpose of democratic rule, on the one hand, and to its methods, on the other.

• Radical leftists hold out for the material interests of the large, wage-dependent majority of the people and object to them being damaged by the demands of the capital-owning minority. They accuse the bourgeois state of oppression by neglecting these interests of the masses, discriminating against them in favor of elite profit interests, lawfully restricting them. They take the legal recognition of these interests to be the valid, but often broken, promise of a social justice that will prevent capitalist exploitation of labor, nationalize capitalist property if necessary, and eliminate the might of the capitalist class. To them, real bourgeois democracy, in which political parties qualify their own state agendas relative to each other, and changing majorities govern for a limited time, is unfinished, yet to be completed by the working majority’s representatives ruling lastingly and without qualification: a socialist workers’ movement. The workers’ proud ‘class consciousness’ is the only true patriotism, fitting for a country that is out to be the true homeland of working people. This is the way, the only way, to make governmental power really match the will of the people.

  When a communist left succeeded in making an anti-capitalist “people’s democratic” revolution along these lines, however, it did not do so using the persuasive power of a proletarian majority, but through a civil war or as a result of chaotic war outcomes. What these leftists proceeded to accomplish was to set up a plan based on monetary units to make the people, now freed from capitalist private interests, serve a party rule now independent of its mass base. This alternative to bourgeois democracy is now a thing of the past worldwide. What the class state has been left with is the standpoint, not of rejecting its agenda, but of correcting it. First of all, it embraces all the more the ideals of social justice that already belong to the moral furnishings of a bourgeois polity. In practical terms, it implements a social policy that, rather than undoing the consequences of capitalist growth for the wage-dependent masses and society in general as well as for the state that looks after it all, mitigates them as best it can, and at the expense of the rich and “superrich.” Secondly, there is a push to make society more democratic, the base should have more say, even in the business world. The central argument for such reforms is to attain social peace, which the state power should really be after itself: a society reconciled with itself, and an indestructibly good relationship between rule and citizens. These are goals that leftists think their policies can serve much better than a half-hearted social repair system and an arrogant elite out of touch with reality.

• For the radical right, legally recognizing conflicting social interests is per se the cardinal sin that the bourgeois state commits. Rightists see it as the state approving antagonisms that tear the people apart, that destroy the absolutely imperative and basically self-evident cohesion of the population in everyday life. By allowing this recognition, even actually establishing it through its legal system, the state is also ruining its own unity with the people and the people’s trust and unity with it. Rightists accordingly object to the pluralism of parties that politically represent and reinforce division of the people. Competition between parties contradicts the sovereign monopoly on the use of force that is responsible for law and order, the very word “monopoly” expressing that it is indivisible and can only function as a single will. Parties competing as a permanent state of affairs drive a wedge between the one sovereign state authority, which is what really matters, and the united people, who are entitled to such an authority. They are entitled to a leader who unites all power in himself. The people are deprived of this right by democratic procedures, competition and changing majorities, the principle of time-limited rule. The compromises that all this ends up with document nothing but weakness. They are a mockery of national state power, which is irresistible when it is applied without compromise. They are an insult to the people, who do not perform their services as a people in order to be conscripted for party interests and the half-measures of an establishment that fall so terribly short of the possibilities, strengths and rights of the nation.

  This right-wing standpoint, at least as a tendency, is familiar to those in government, to those having a share in government on the opposition side, and especially to those democrats enlisted as voters; it is exactly what many of them think. After all, what right-wing enemies of democracy are after as the prime political requirement is nothing other than the fullness of power that an elected government has and makes use of as long as it is in office, and is quite reluctant to give up. Seeing legal restrictions as an obstacle and circumventing them wherever possible is a matter of course to democratic politicians when they feel the rights of their rule are in danger and they have a national mission — it might even be an obligation to do so, but in any case certainly not right-wing extremism. If a country falls short of the objectives it has set for itself, and important national projects clearly fail, it is obvious to conclude that the government’s weakness is to blame; for the democratic opposition, this conclusion is the quintessential argument. The parties compete mainly by critically and self-critically demanding ever tougher government action. And this demand has the potential — especially, but by no means only — in times of crisis to turn against party competition itself as a wrong procedure for making decisions and exercising power for rule.

  That is what the radical right is fighting for, to correct state power in that way; it tries to be a movement, breaking out of the status of one political party among many. When it succeeds and wins power, it very directly puts into practice the ideal of a united people and their right to uncompromising rule. Deploying its supporters and the security apparatus it has taken over, which finally gets to show what it is good for, it gets down to“Gleichschaltung,” bringing into line the organized separate interests of its otherwise intact class society, especially the competing parties. It starts training the people to totally embrace their national identity, and eliminating all disruptive elements that are alien to the people. When it has to wait a while to succeed — as can happen in a “resilient democracy” — the right mobilizes its good people against those in power, calling them traitors to the people. These traitors tolerate, even support and fawn over, foreigners, outsiders, leftists and the “idle rich” (rightists can also use “capitalism” as a dirty word), intellectuals alienated from the people, and other subversive elements. And the right agitates for the great alternative for the nation: the masses must cry out for that one “strong man,” the disadvantage being that a true leader only emerges by succeeding with the masses and not just by the proclamation that the people wish for one.

*

As the administrator of a location for capital that competes with others, the state needs and lays claim to its citizens’ unconditional loyalty, bringing it about with its monopoly on the use of force. This loyalty has to prove itself not only by letting the exploitation of labor and social competition as a whole take their course in a civil and socially harmonious way, letting capital growth succeed, and letting political rule itself gain power. The unconditional unity of people and leadership faces its acid test when state power definitively emancipates itself, for the sake of the national whole, from the interests it serves for the sake of this same great whole. The acid test is the nation’s readiness for war.

Sovereign power beyond the state’s borders

In their dealings with each other, states appeal to the “principle of non-interference in internal affairs.” In a world of cross-border capitalist competition this is a joke — on the one hand. On the other hand, it expresses the fundamental reservation that sovereigns with their monopoly on the use of force have toward each other. This reservation is of the utmost importance to them precisely because they have made their most important “internal affair,” the national growth that is the basis of their power, increasingly dependent on each other, with no way back. This dependence relates not just to the economic activities they make use of abroad and have to offer themselves, but to foreign sovereigns being reliably willing to satisfy their demands. States insist that their autonomy be respected, thereby revealing the contradiction involved in their practice of utilizing the outside world for their own capitalist reason of state. As guarantors of national growth, they require control over the conditions of business since they live on its success in international competition, while this claim of theirs is faced with the countervailing power of their rivals’ identical interest, whose monopoly on the use of force is the outer limit of their own, which they have been overstepping for some time. As global trading powers, they are constantly “interfering” in each other’s political decision-making. Conversely, by allowing foreign capital to operate in their own territory they have granted the guardians of that capital power a certain amount of control over their own national economic life.

The rulers in charge perceive this contradiction in their state’s agenda as a challenge: as the task of not letting their autonomous decision-making power be restricted by the necessities of cross-border capitalist growth, and exerting a lasting influence on their economic partners’ decision-making. This does not alter the commercial interests and necessities themselves, but does make a crucial difference when it comes to their political significance. The state relates everything it does in this area to itself as the authority that has the sovereignty to give whatever it finds important the quality of being a right whose enforcement it guarantees. And this applies not just at home but also abroad, vis-à-vis its peers, who are exercising the same sovereign standpoint. In this relationship, it is one right against another’s from the outset. This conflict is opened up once right-creating state powers recognize each other as a condition for utilizing each other. It is opened up as the dispute about how much a claimed right is actually worth. That is, how much will establishing cross-border commercial and monetary transactions impair a state’s guarantee power and will that be bearable, and conversely how much influence will it achieve on the policies of foreign sovereigns? In both directions, politics focuses on the force that the state confers on capitalist property and that it also guarantees beyond its borders, i.e., it focuses on the state’s sovereignty as such.

This gives state power’s globally-reaching service for the competition of capitalists its higher political objective. Not only does the state have to make sure national growth has what it needs as such, it must also heed the overriding viewpoint, and when required follow the practical guideline, of employing the economic necessities it is thereby establishing and guaranteeing, as instruments for waging a competition involving mutual blackmail between sovereigns. At this level it is a matter of trying to make the will of another state reliably useable; it is about no less than one sovereign power dominating or being subordinate to another. However, this struggle requires more than a calculating use of the state force objectified in capitalistic necessities. What a state is after is respect for its force that turns the business of capitalism into constraints that operate outside its borders. It is out to make its own autonomously established rights a premise for other states to base their calculating decision-making on. To this end, the state, with its monopoly on the use of force, applies the means it actually has at its autonomous disposal: itself as the master of an apparatus of force; one that enables it to directly coerce its peers. This ability is tacitly assumed in states’ everyday routine of using and pressuring each other. The military is not the means of choice for normal cross-border business. But this business only works on the basis of a relationship of force, however it has been settled, between right-creating sovereigns.

This is the starting point for the foreign policy of capitalist nations, and it is the crux of this policy.

The state: Beneficiary and victim of its status in the world of states

Military force is indeed necessary for taking possession of a country and its inhabitants so as to have a monopoly on the use of force there, and for barring other states from encroaching on this territory.^[2] This necessity persists as a precondition for state power to serve the capitalists’ need for growth beyond all borders. As competition between capitalists unfolds worldwide and state power subjects the world to their interests, the contradiction involved therein unfolds between the capitalist system overstepping every border and its being established and run on a territorial basis by national sovereigns. States are confronted with the ultimate consequence of this contradiction when they insist on their autonomy against each other, which they at the same time qualify, i.e., call into question, with regard to each other.

Yet all states — still — see a quite fundamental need to entrust their military with the task of home defense. On this point they are even particularly petty, counting in square inches to make clear how unwilling they are to compromise when it comes to the area they claim to possess, which of course includes their human resources. Although the earth’s solid surface has been divided pretty completely into recognized nation states — as a result of the post-war era of decolonization — this has by no means taken care of the idea that an interest in conquests is the first and most serious danger for bourgeois states. From Israel through Pakistan and India to China and Taiwan, there are open disputes over territorial claims of major caliber. Conflicting sovereign interests are directed at countries that used to belong to the Soviet Union. There are quite a few states that count citizens of other nations as their own people and reserve the right to bring them home. Germany’s “reunification” is an extremely successful extreme case of such irredentism. Nevertheless, it is not by shifting borders that states mainly combat the contradiction of the capitalistic utilization of the globe having a territorial basis, that is, combat their share of that utilization being restricted by foreign sovereignty. They have agreed to recognize their borders, in order to surmount them. What this actually means is that they have opened up a competition to functionalize the other recognized national sovereigns for their own national interests, a competition that knows neither geographical or qualitative bounds, that is universal, and that reaches deep into foreign polities. Consequently, they have opened up the struggle to gain what is known as “influence,” a term that is nice and downplaying but cannot be misunderstood. It refers to overpowering other sovereigns in their autonomous decision-making. This is a competitive struggle no state in the world can escape. That is why all states have a genuine, general, that is to say, an absolute security problem. It is absolute in the sense that it is not just their sovereign rule over a territory and its inventory that is at issue, but their sovereignty over how to shape their sphere of rule and beyond to meet their own goals. It is about their freedom to set goals as rulers at all, the whole agenda for their state power. This is what they have to secure; this is the truly fundamental task to be fulfilled by their security policy. This freedom can of course not be expressed in square inches as easily as home defense can. Or to put it another way, the competitive battle to ensure that another state power is compliant can indeed be waged with military attacks on its territory. But then the attacker’s purpose is to exert “influence” on a troublesome ruler, not conquer and take control of land. And for that purpose, for ensuring that other rulers function as required, it is all the more important to have a military power that is capable of doing whatever it takes to make sure foreign rulers are not free to make autonomous decisions.

It is the imperative of satisfying this need for force that is the ultimate challenge for a nation’s economic capability: for the mass and growth rate of its capitalist wealth, the quality of its credit money, the reach of its grip on resources under foreign sovereignty, etc. Everything that determines a country’s status in the competition of national capital locations, its position in the hierarchy of economic powers, has to stand the higher political test of supporting a military capacity that can hold its own against that of other states. At the same time, it is clear, especially to security policymakers and military functionaries, that this task can never be completed. Every military achievement renders the previous source of security obsolete, thus reproducing and intensifying the problem to be solved. So the states’ need for security opens up a never-ending struggle for superiority that separates beneficiaries and victims on the basis of their successes and failures in economic competition but much more thoroughly than the comparison of capitalist performance. For one thing, this struggle forces its actors to arrange their national budget so that they are always living beyond their economic means. They are obliged to spare no expense when it comes to the question of wielding force and their freedom of action as a condition for enforcing their reason of state abroad. They procure the freedom of action they need for this purpose by incurring debt according to the rules of system-compliant budget policy. However, according to the same rules they must also be able to afford the debt. This is opposed by the fact that military costs are strictly faux frais of rule: unproductive costs for a lot of personnel and a vast amount of material that are kept in reserve for nothing but destruction. This shows up all the more the limits of the military state’s debt capacity that are imposed by the power or lack of power of its national credit, and tangible in the valuation of its credit money. For another thing, it is not only that the unproductive use-values of the military (disregarding the pure personnel costs) are a costly affair; they have to be produced in usually very fluctuating quantities and be constantly developed further, which requires a capital advance out of budgetary funds that very few nations can manage. Just to get the famous “barrels of guns” that “political power grows out of,” according to a dated bon mot of Mao Zedong's, most countries have to rely on suppliers who are interested in them as states or quasi-states to be used as military helpers. The so-called emerging countries have mostly crossed the threshold to producing arms they can finance themselves, and are stimulating the global armaments market as suppliers as well as buyers. However, they rarely come close to the potential of the so-called industrialized countries, which are leaders in this area as well, since the latter have the world-money and the technological progress to be able to put a maximum distance between themselves and the few other creditable military powers, which they do not hesitate to do. They maintain a “military-industrial complex” — critically thus termed since the 1950s — in which capital and state power combine in a particularly productive way. The state demands an arsenal to ensure its superiority at ever higher levels, paying for it with credit that it has by virtue of being the creator of a real world-money. A capitalist industry does everything to give its big customer even more than it asks for, thereby constantly winning the nice, ultimately risk-free competition for inexhaustible budget funds. The financial industry finds optimal opportunities for business on both sides, investing in the state’s demand for means of force and advancing funds for their production and perfecting. The additional demand from weaker military powers that manage to drum up quite a bit of buying power for such fine goods increases profits, benefits the state’s trade and financial balances, and is above all productive in terms of foreign policy for the leading states, because their license for such trade ensures — once again — influence between “partners.” The end result is that, established at the top of a hierarchically sorted world of states, there are a small number of leading imperialist actors: global powers both in capitalistic and in military terms, which compete, form coalitions, and contend at their own level to assert themselves through superior might.

How the need for guarantees and corrections specifically works

States see their status in the world, their place in the hierarchy of powers, not as an objective state of affairs but as a challenge to improve their standing. The way they look at themselves mixes the benefit with the sacrifices they have to make. The result of this mixture is their starting point for defining that rank in the hierarchy of sovereigns that they should actually have — which in some way has to be something like number one. In any case, their will to assert themselves is oriented to the future power and recognition they lay claim to. Setting their own standards of success is the essence of their sovereignty. In principle.

In concrete and practical terms, a state perceives the fundamental challenge of securing its power by strengthening it as a critical — friendly or conflict-laden — relationship with certain other state powers that are supposed to benefit it and instead often enough make life difficult. It categorizes its interests according to the material substance of its various foreign relations and its specific power relationship with the particular other state. That is, how much can each side influence the other, and using what means? Some interests it defines as vital, others as not, thus setting conditions for how to deal with other states, along with business conditions for competing capitalists, which are often not at all to their liking. After all, no matter what particular decision has to be made, the important thing is that the other side has to recognize the right that one attaches to one’s interests. In the negotiations that a state conducts, it uses calculating gradations to bring itself into play as an argument: the respect it is demanding from the other side. Testing the persuasive power of this argument with the aim of asserting oneself is the task and domain of diplomacy. What it deals with is everything that states have to arrange with each other, from the very real point of view of what one side has to put up with from the other or cannot put up with. It is the degree of recognition or rejection that states address their need for guarantees and corrections to, asserting this need against each other by way of their business relations, down to the price of individual goods if need be. That is what their struggle is about.

An important place in this struggle is occupied by the category of honor. It acts as a yardstick for the current state of relations and for how hard the assertive claims are that a state is upholding in its negotiations; it determines the vocabulary and grammar of diplomacy. The material interests being pursued in this way are taken as given and cannot be misunderstood when they are asserted in the name of idealistic values and national dignity. This substitution makes it clear how serious a state is about the matter. Stories are told about what a nation’s history of suffering and success actually entitles it to: land and people it has lost, compensation for injustice suffered, but also authority due to glorious deeds of the past, etc. The message is primarily directed to the public at home: citizens are supposed to approve sympathetically of what state power is doing in the world with them as a people, even rooting for it in critical situations. But these are also clear messages between sovereigns in their international business, the recipients knowing very well they are being targeted when a state presents itself as an honorary member of the club of chastened human-rights advocates, criticizing investment decisions by domestic companies in selected distant regions.

Such lofty tones naturally become particularly loud and clear when the competitive fight for assured recognition, i.e., for successful assertion of a nation’s reason of state, leads to the inevitable, namely, to certain hostilities. One very notable task of diplomacy is to approach disruptive rivals and create conflicts in order to resolve them to one’s own satisfaction. Even if the envisioned solution fails because it is actually designed to do so, the other side is always to blame. It is violating a right that only one’s own side has, maybe even an “inalienable” one. So it is defying the power of the affected party to enforce its right that has been violated. Each side thus forces the other to calculate how important the conflict is to it; whether to respond with force, which means of force to use, and how much force to use. In practice, this results in each side mobilizing foreign support for resolving its conflict, testing how adamant the opponent is, and doing all those other things that make that condition called peace so terribly interesting.

It is once again the great imperialist powers that are best at this art of blackmail and its effective escalation, acquiring allies, etc. From the standpoint of superiority they are sure of having, they have developed an arsenal and methods for managing conflicts, even in the most serious cases, that follow this pattern: when a problem state makes use of its autonomy in a hostile way, it must be made to bear costs that it cannot handle. At the lowest level, sanctions are imposed with the aim of diminishing the target’s economic and military assets, of downgrading its global political status. In order for these sanctions to be effective, alliances are formed, by the force of secondary sanctions if necessary. At its highest level of escalation, this procedure earns itself the name of economic warfare, because it aims to destroy the material means that states need for autonomously deploying power. When it becomes the objective to disempower the opponent, the conflict turns into a declaration of incompatibility, bringing the coercive military force into play that each side has already built up in view of the enemy that now needs to be finished off.

War

The first way a state deploys its capacity for war is deterrence policy. It has this name to make clear that all dangerous conflicts are the other party’s fault; that party must be deterred from committing serious misdeeds. The policy furthermore has a good reputation across party lines because it also claims the deterring power is not only interested in preventing the enemy from attacking out of the malice it is assumed to have, it is also interested in altogether avoiding a violent conflict that might be required after all. This claim is self-refuting, since the claimed effect assumes one’s own weapons are superior and one is absolutely determined not to avoid war at all. The only condition that waging war is made contingent on is the supposedly belligerent enemy seeing itself to be inferior and making the opposite decision. But this illogic has not detracted from the claim’s popularity since the days of the ancient Roman war cry, “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you seek peace, prepare for war). And deterrence policy as it is put into practice has certainly not suffered from the transition regularly being made from threat to actual war; why should it? This policy takes the lie that avoiding war is the true purpose of seriously threatening it, and sets it right. Every power that operates with deterrence is indeed out to achieve its war aim without war; and what that means is clear once and for all when the emphasis is reversed: such states are pursuing the contradictory business of achieving nothing less than the war outcome they insist on having, without waging war, without the expenditure of destructive power along with the subsequent costs, and the risks to themselves that war would entail. This is why real deterrence policy — in contrast to the relevant rhetoric — is anything but a combination of armament programs and mere threats referring to some eventuality. The adversary gets weapons aimed at it; the threat to use them is about really damaging its power, something one is actively pressing ahead with if necessary, intending to contest the adversary’s ability to act and ultimately make it unable to act altogether. To this end, states make use of diplomatic messages and fighting words belonging to the sphere of national honor-mongering, which inform the adversary of the incompatibility decision that has been made without officially declaring war on it at the same time. The talk is of “values”; “common” ones that hold a war alliance together; universally valid ones like “peace” and “order” that are shared by everyone but the evil enemy. Formulas like “outlaw state” or “rogue nation” deny that an enemy’s rule has internal legitimacy, so in this case there is no formal basis for upholding the sacred principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other sovereigns, and one can question or directly revoke the premise of international politics, mutual recognition as monopolists on the use of force. By the practice of targeted damage that progresses under such names, states that are no longer willing to tolerate each other establish a relationship of continuing cold war, the aim being to disempower the adversary. This idyll is always just one explicit final ultimatum away from a military attack on the enemy’s power base — its economy, weapons, people.

Hostile states aggravate or ease this relationship — formulating “red lines,” letting ultimatums lapse, seeing war “break out,” or actually waging war in the end — depending on a calculation that correlates mainly two things. First, the degree of intolerability one has defined for the enemy, its reason of state and its might, including any steps forward or backward in disempowering it, and second, the comparison of each side’s military strength, including a more or less self-critical assessment of one’s own superiority or inferiority. Because they calculate in this way, and as long as they are still doing so — sometimes also making misjudgments and transitions to folly — the masters of war and peace present the militancy they are practicing as a continued effort to avoid war, in keeping with the ideology of deterrence. In fact, it reveals the opposite: even when a state embarks on annihilation, on industrially prefabricated killing and destroying, including its own sacrifice of living and material means of power, it is making a calculation, which has its own rationality, following the reason of sovereign freedom of action. War, as the last way state power serves the competition of capitalists, is not “lunacy” but rather an undertaking that has to pay off — not for the profit of the capitalist business world, which is not waging it and has not asked for it, but for the state, the monopolist on the use of force. For precisely when it is sacrificing everything needed to win out over one of its peers, it is acting as the condition for everything that its people and it itself live on.

The authors of the wars taking place in the world always have particular, specific, of course only good, reasons for waging them. However, there is one general reason why they keep finding such reasons for war. It lies in the contradictory logic of the service that the state performs for its class society by doing everything for itself — being the unconditional condition for its society to function and the guarantor of its success — at its society’s expense, from the very beginning and to the bitter end. This is a logic also followed by the heads of formally recognized states who have little functional capitalism to govern, but as modern rulers struggle just as resolutely as their imperialist role models to achieve recognition, improve their status, enforce their rule beyond their borders. The particular conflicts of interest that are fought out in cold or — eventually or straightaway — hot wars are diverse and may be disparate; this applies all the more to the ways these wars proceed. But the fact that war is part of the fixed repertoire of state action, being “the continuation of politics by other means,”^[†] has a necessity that cannot be rooted out — without world revolution! — in the enlightened age of civilian-administered ministries of defense, global arms markets, and humanitarian conventions of war. This necessity is grounded in the contradiction that global capitalism has a territorial basis: it has been created and develops through the interaction of a number of mutually exclusive monopolists on the use of force.

The major imperialist competitors do not need to know that this contradiction is what modern imperialism is all about at every level up to war. In their competition, they are struggling to overcome it. That is why, in this system, not even war is the last word.

© GegenStandpunkt 2024