Week 11 (The State) Flashcards
The State
A form of political organization in which the lives of people are heavily influenced and coerced (governed) by distant authorities who hold a predominance of power within a large and specified geographic territory
Characteristics of “The State”
“The state” is everywhere, today they are ubiquitous, with almost all of the earth’s people and territory under the control of a state
States are powerful. Many states have billions of dollars worth of military and economic resources. What they do, therefore, has big implications for the lives of the human beings under their control.
States are relatively new. For almost all of human history (~99.8%) humans have not lived in states.
Influence of the State in citizens lives
The state regulates and controls many aspects of everyday life;
What’s in your food
What you learn in school
Where you can live
Where you can park
How you spend your money
How fast you can drive
What you can say
The State and Punishment
in addition to implementing regulations and rules, the state has the ability to punish those who deviate from these rules. For example, when you cheat the Government of Canada by committing tax evasion or tax fraud, Punishments include…
Huge financial penalties
Up to 14 years in prison
From 2017-2022, 140 Canadian taxpayers found guilty of tax evasion and tax fraud spent a total of 119 years in jail.
The Case for the State
without the power of the state, human rights norms and laws are meaningless, mere pieces of paper. Without the state and its police force and judicial system, there is no compelling authority to deter criminal behaviour and implement punishments. In the international context, there would be no organizations such as the ICC or the HRW to deter large scale human rights abuses
The Case against the State
1.)Anarchists argue that “the state” is a major cause of repression and suffering. They advocate for its destruction and replacement by small, decentralized, and independent villages and communes. Anarchists argue that the evils of “the state” are shown in times of revolution, where a group seeks to overthrow an existing repressive government only for it to be replaced with another repressive government
Anarchists
Anarchy arose as an explanation for the gulf between the rich and the poor in any community, and why the poor have been obliged to fight for their share of common inheritance, and as a radical answer to the question “what went wrong?” following the outcome of the French Revolution
Anarchists and their precursors were unique on the political Left in affirming that workers and peasants were betrayed by the new class of politicians who used violence and terror to maintain control after rising to power post-revolution.
The state itself is the enemy. Every state protects the privileges of the powerful
Argue that property should be held in mutual control by local communities, federating for innumerable joint purposes with other comunes. Anarcho-syndicalism emphasizes the organized industrial workers who could expropriate the possessors of capital
All threads of anarchy are linked through their rejection of external authority, whether that of the state
John Lanchesters “life before the state”
1.)Diets were diverse, food was abundant, and the farming that did occur focused on growing a variety of different kinds of crops, not just grains
2.)No taxes (where taxes = money or resources paid to some distant centralized authority)
3.) Life was less busy (Only about 17 hours a week to find adequate food supply and 19 on domestic activities and choses. A comparable week in the United states was 40 hours of work and 36 on domestic labour)
4.)Life was more intimately connected to the natural environment, less based on a desire to control and dominate it Life was more intimately connected to the natural environment, less based on a desire to control and dominate it (did not accumulate surpluses)
5.)Life was more egalitarian and less hierarchical
Is John Lanchesters argument convincing?
Is there enough accurate information to come to any firm conclusions about pre-state life and how it might compare to life under the state?
Discussion about the reliability of quantitative data can help you answer this question
Not all scholars agree with this positive depiction of pre-state, hunter-gatherer life
Some point to evidence that suggests more negative conclusions about the quality of life before the state, and that positive interpretations of ancestral hunter-gatherer life are biased with frustrations with the ills of modern society and desire for alternatives
We often think of humanity as moral in intention and rational in action. But, if the argument that life before the state was so great, what explains the state’s widespread acceptance and dominance around the world, so much so that we barely know or consider any political non-state alternatives
To what extent can we blame the state for such things like slavery, exploitation, war, taxation, destruction of local knowledge and ways of living?
Did the state cause these behaviours? Or do they reflect deeply-rooted human tendencies that long pre-date the state
Stateless Democracy
1.)Decentralized rule and highly localized forms of political participation
Extensive devolution of power to the local council level and empowers communities to take the decisions affecting them at the local level
These local level administrations will take part in and represent themselves at the provincial, the regional, and the national levels
Ocalan claimed the goal is not to establish a state but democracy, it is the right of the non-state groups/communities to create their model to discuss and solve their own problems at the level of villages, neighborhoods and cities.
2.)Decisions made via direct democracy in citizen assemblies
The most effective way to limit state power is by empowering the society and adoption a system based on participatory citizenship and direct democracy through establishing citizen assemblies
Stateless democracy, as a system where the people govern themselves should not be mistaken for a state of chaos and anarchy. It should rather be seen as a system which is based on the virtue of citizenship, in which people participate voluntarily, and in which the principle of the delegating and withdrawing powers is effective without strict bureaucratic rules/
Kurdish Stateless Democracy
Initially, the PKK, (Kurdish Workers’ Party) advocated to unite all parts of Kurdistan under an independent socialist state
However, they changed their minds after an empirical assessment of other left-wing self-determination movements around the world and their ability to achieve their moral goals
PKK leadership found that movements often failed to build the kind of ethical and just society they said they wanted
Ocalan referred to this as “real existing socialism” - strong authoritarian and repressive states at war with their people. He developed the following golden rule: The more state, the less democracy, or the more democracy, the less state
