For some time, Ian has been referring to the government as a racket. I
thought that he and the rest of you might enjoy what I picked up in the
first few pages here:
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I got on to this line of thinking after reading David Held's chapter on
Schumpeter's "competitive elitism" in "Models of Democracy" a few years ago.
Schumpeter rejects the idea of a public good and/or public interest [this partly
explains conservatives love for his ideas]. When you mix that with Thomas
Ferguson's "the Golden Rule" which is an extensive look at the history of how
political party formation in the US has been tied to huge sums of cash from
rivalrous capitalist blocs, well...
I then happened upon Charles Tilly's work and things really started clicking
with regards to Marx' statement in the Grundrisse: "Bourgeois economists delude
themselves with the notion that better production is possible under a modern
police system than under the law of the mailed fist, for example. They simply
forget that the latter is also a law and that the right of might still lives on,
in another form, in their constitutional state."
I'm really interested in the contestability that accompanied the origins of
territorialization under the Westphalian system because it's real hard,
historically, to separate the origins of the corporate form from mercenarism,
banditry, privateering and the like and their relation to the idea of revolution
and legitimation. Lots of these forms still exist and thrive in various parts of
the world today and, in conjunction with the various ways Westphalian
sovereignty is contested by the free trade paradigm, makes for a interesting
rethink of legitimacy, coercion and the very meanings of crime, regulation and
law. Ecologically, our current political territories are totally misdrawn and
thus severely hamper the formation of administrative and political co-ordination
in solving "transboundary" pollution and other problems related to the
production of goods and services. Thus the tensions between local-global in the
ecopolitics debate and the need to contest policy sovereignty etc. in a manner
that both challenges the very assumptions of the free trade paradigm [somebody
somewhere is always already being protected and externalizing the costs of that
protection], yet looks askance at liberal notions of sovereignty, "national
power" and autarky as well.
Ian
"Mercenaries, Pirates & Sovereigns" by Janice Thomson
"War Making and State Making as Organized Crime"
and "Coercion, Capital and European States AD 990-1992" by Charles Tilly
"The Protection Racket State:Elite Politics, Military Extortion, and Civil War
in El Salvador" by William Stanley
