Mr. Gindin, in his article We Need to Say What Socialism Will Look Like argues the following:
The expectations of full or near-full abundance, added to perfect or near-perfect social consciousness, have a further consequence: they imply a dramatic waning, if not end, of substantive social conflicts and so do away with any need for an “external” state. This fading away of the state is, as well, rooted in how we understand the nature of states. If states are reduced to only being oppressive institutions, then the democratization of the state by definition brings the withering away of the state (a “fully democratic state” becomes an oxymoron). On the other hand, if the state is seen as a set of specialized institutions that not only mediate social differences and oversee judicial discipline but also superintend the replacement of the hegemony of class and competitive markets with the democratic planning of the economy, then the state will likely play an even greater role under socialism.
I will deal with Mr. Gindin’s inadequate conception of freedom and necessity in a socialist society in a later post that continues a description of what socialist society may look like. Here, I will begin a critique of Mr. Gindin’s idealization of the state when he implies that the nature of the state will expand under a socialist system.
Mr. Gindin, as his typical of his social-democratic point of view, vastly underestimates the importance and nature of the existing repressive nature of any government or state that presupposes the legitimacy of the power of a class of employers. He refers to “superintend the replacement of the hegemony of class and competitive markets” while simultaneously referring to the state as “overseeing judicial discipline.” What would “overseeing judicial discipline” mean in a socialist society? What would “judicial discipline” mean in a socialist society? No one will find an answer to these questions in his article since Mr. Gindin’s reference is simply vague.
Let us assume, however, that by “judicial discipline” Mr. Gindin means “the rule of law.” What does the “rule of law” mean? Many who refer to the rule of law believe that it prevents the government from infringing on the rights of citizens. This is a myth since the rule of law is just as vague as Mr. Gindin’s reference to “overseeing judicial discipline” or even “judicial discipline.”
What is the myth of the rule of law? It is the myth that citizens are somehow protected, by means of the law, from arbitrary actions by government officials of one form or another. The rule of law, rather, is a rule of order. This is the real function of police. The rule of law, for example, is supposed to limit the power of police–but does it?
From Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power, pages 112-113:
Since, as we have seen, law-enforcement is merely an incidental and derivative part of police work, and since, as Lustgarten has noted, the police invariably under-enforce the law, the equation of policing with law enforcement is clearly untenable. The police enforce the law because it falls within the scope of their larger duties of regulating order which, in an ideological loop of remarkable ingenuity, is then justified in terms of crime control and the need to ‘uphold the law’. In other words, law enforcement becomes part of police work to the same extent as anything else in which the exercise of force for the maintenance of order may have to be used, and only to that extent. Police practices are designed to conform to and prioritize not law, but order, as the judges and police have long known. Law-enforcement is therefore a means to an end rather than an end in itself, as witnessed by the fact that, for example, police often prefer to establish order without arrest. The assumption central to the rule of law that people should not take the law into ‘their own hands’ reminds us not only that the law is meant to be used and controlled by chosen hands, as Bauman puts it, but that police do in fact handle rather than enforce the
law. The law is a resource for dealing with problems of disorder rather than a set of rules to be followed and enforced. The kind of police behaviour which offends the sensibilities of civil libertarians or which seems at odds with the assumptions in the liberal democratic conception of the rule of law in fact turns out to be within the law and exercised according to the need to deal with things considered disorderly. The police follow rules, but these are police rules rather than legal rules. Thus when exercising discretion, the police are never quite using it to enforce the law, as one might be led to believe. Rather, officers decide what they want to do and then fit their legal powers around that decision. Hence the main ‘Act’ which police officers purport to enforce is the ‘Ways and Means Act’, a set of mythical powers which they use to mystify and confuse suspects, and the question of whether an officer should detain a suspect on legal grounds is displaced by the question ‘which legal reason shall I use to justify detaining this person’. Exercised according to police criteria rather than specific legal criteria, the rules are rules for the abolition of disorder, exercised by the police and enabled by law.
Mr. Gindin’s reference to “judicial discipline” assumes that the judiciary will continue to exist as a separate institution–like now. He presumably also assumes that police will never be abolished since he eternalizes “scarcity” (as noted above, I will criticize this view in another article). With scarcity, there will be necessary some external force to ensure that people who do not follow the (mythological) law will be properly “motivated” to follow not the law but the order of scarcity. Socialism in such a situation will resemble the capitalist order in various ways.
The social implication of the rule of law or “judicial discipline” can also be seen in terms of the effects on how people would feel in Mr. Gindin’s “realistic socialism”–fear. From Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power, page 113:
‘We fear the policeman’ then, as Slavoj Zizek comments, ‘insofar as he is not just himself, a person like us, since his acts are the acts of power, that is to say, insofar as he is experienced as the stand-in for the big Other, for the social order.’ And it is because the police officer is the stand-in for social order that order is the central trope around which even the smallest police act is conducted. As a number of ex-police officers have testified,
the police themselves are obsessed with order, being institutionalized to achieve order at all times and in all contexts. Malcolm Young has commented on how one folder containing a record of the Orders by a range of senior officers reveals ‘how everything in this world had an ordained place and could therefore be controlled, ordered, disciplined, checked, scrutinized’. Likewise ex-police sergeant Simon Holdaway has pointed to the way prisoners are treated as ‘visible evidence of disorder’. Needing to detect and end disorder among citizens, the police cannot cope with ambiguity in any way. In dealing with any particular situation a police officer makes a decision about what, if anything, is out of order and then makes a decision about how to overcome it. Because each individual officer is institutionalized to achieve order at all times the police institution must have a strong sense of the order they are there to reproduce, reflected in the activities they are taught to pursue, the techniques they use in pursuit, and compounded by a unitary and absolutist view of human behaviour and social organization.
The police as the representative of “order” entails not only fear but a need for the expression of deference. From Mark Neocleous, The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power, pages 113-114:
So for example, failure to display deference to an officer significantly increases the probability of arrest, for it is understood as a failure to display deference to an officer’s demand for order. Any hostility directed to them is treated as an attack on their authority and power to order, and thus an attack on authority and order in general, mediated by
a supposed hostility to the Law. Antagonistic behaviour is a symbolic rejection of their authoritative attempt to reconstitute order out of a disorderly situation; it is this which may result in more formal (i.e. legal) methods of control. Regardless of the legal issues pertinent to the situation, the failure to display deference is therefore likely to make one an object of the law as an arrested person as a means of reproducing order.
Mr. Gindin’s world of scarcity probably looks a lot like the capitalist world order.
This view is consistent with Mr. Gindin’s conservative attitude–he could not even criticize the conservative pairing of a movement for increasing the minimum wage to $15 and for instituting needed employment law reforms with the idea of “fairness.” He even claimed that the justification by some trade unionists here in Toronto who used the term “decent work” were using it in a purely defensive manner–which is nonsense.
Indeed, the term “decent work” is linked to the repressive nature of the capitalist government or state since those who perform “decent work” in a society dominated by a class of employers can thereby pat themselves on the back while they look down on those who lack “decent work.” From Richard Ericson, Reproducting Order: A Study of Police Patrol Work, page 204:
The police can easily justify additional resources, including the latest in protective headgear, because they have a solid populist constituency among the ‘hard hats’ of ‘decent working people.’ These people have a great stake in the status quo because they have invested their very lives in it. In relation to them, the politics of ‘lawandorder’ is part of ‘the politics of resentment.’ According to people who analyse this politics (e.g. Friedenberg, 1975,1980, 1980a; Gaylin et al, 1978) these individuals are apparently frustrated by the
imprisonment of conformity within the status quo. Conformity yields payouts which they judge to be meager; the payouts are assessed relatively and thus prove insatiable. These people take out their frustrations against those contained in the criminal prisons, and against all others who do things, however vaguely defined, which suggest that they are gaining pleasure outside conventional channels. For these conventionals, it is better to seek the painful channels of convention and to avoid pleasures. For this reason, they support the construction of an elaborate apparatus aimed at ensuring that those who seek to experience disreputable pleasures and to avoid pain will eventually, and often repeatedly, suffer pain that more than cancels out their pleasures. Moreover, it seems that people are willing to support the construction of this apparatus at all costs.
Mr. Gindin, far from providing a critique of the modern social order, panders to such an order and reinforces the proclivity of Canadians to call for more order (a stronger police presence and a stronger police state). From Richard Ericson, Reproducting Order: A Study of Police Patrol Work, page 204:
This mythology is so dominant that even when a major crisis erupts, and the media help to reveal systematic structural flaws in control agencies, public support for the police remains strong. This is clearly evident in the continuing revelations about the wide net of illegal practices cast by the RCMP (see Mann and Lee, 1979). In spite of repeated revelations about illegal practices against legitimate political groups, illegal opening of the mail, illegal trespasses and thefts in private premises, and the manufacturing of news stories to serve its own interests, the RCMP still maintains its popularity in public opinion polls (ibid). Indeed, some politicians have responded to this exposure by calling for legislation to legalize previously illegal practices and for a reassertion of authority within the administrative structure of the RCMP. As Friedenberg (1980, 1980a) points out, this type of response is typical of the Canadian reaction to any crisis in authority: ‘The solution for the failure of authority is more authority …
Mr. Gindin’s view of the future “expansion of the state” simply ignores the repressive nature of the modern state and claims that it merely needs to be transformed. What he means by “transformation” seems, however, to be more of the same–repression, fear, deference. After all, with scarcity, property rights must be protected to ensure that workers are motivated to engage in work (rather than pilfering from others).
Such is the real nature of socialism for Mr. Gindin.
In a future post, I will, unlike Mr. Gindin, continue a critical analysis of the police, the law and the government or state that protects class order–the class order of employers above all.
Of course, workers also call the police in order to protect themselves from each other–to deny that would be naive. That workers experience the police as oppressive does not prevent them from relying on the police to protect what limited rights they do have on occasion–but the extent to which the police and the courts protect workers’ rights should not be exaggerated. Nor should it prevent us from seeing the major function of the police to protect the existing order–and use the law as a means to that end. The primary issue for the police is order–and to seek justifications for maintaining or reestablishing order–including using the law to justify their actions after the fact.
The Abolitionary 