View transcript: The Withering Away of the State

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What does GLOBALIZATION mean? / To what extent does it affect SYSTEMSWORLD and LIFEWORLD? / What does LEFT mean? / Oskar Negt on: THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE –

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THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE, what is that? / Oskar Negt on: Globalization as blackmail material

Alexander Kluge

Keyword The Withering Away of the State. What does that mean? It’s a Marxist concept.

Oskar Negt

It’s a concept Marx uses in “Class Struggles in France,” coined on occasion of the Paris Commune 1870-71, where he says: What is the Commune, what is a commune? It is defined by its own productive existence. The state has been reclaimed by society. That means, the state has lost its function of power as a bourgeois state, and state functions are now regulated by society. That’s what he thinks of as the state withering away.

Kluge

At that point, Marx and Engels are working as writers in London. Scholars or writers. They write for a New York newspaper and observe the developments in Paris. Paris is surrounded and besieged by Prussian troops. The French national army, if you will, is defeated at Sedan. And now the people have staged a resistance, a protest movement, that means they have taken over the power in Paris, and they govern Paris in a brotherly fashion.

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Oskar Negt, sociologist

Negt

But mainly in Paris, and that’s the problem with this uprising – it’s very centralized, and when Paris falls, the entire country falls as well. And the Prussian troops were part of, or were in fact decisive in the defeat of the Commune’s rebellion.

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Marx and his wife Jenny, née von Westphalen

Kluge

But in the final phase, in the death throes of an empire, if we want to use big words, we see the emergence of utopian thought, where the people take over the government and rule themselves.

Negt

Yes. For a short period and within a limited range. And Marx explicitly talks about the state withering away. He doesn’t talk about the abolishment of the state. You can’t abolish the state, and you can’t destroy it either. It merely withers away to the degree that its functions concerning society as a whole …

Kluge

… are taken over by others; are taken over in an act of self-regulation.

Negt

Are taken over and are now executed by society. Self-regulation replaces the repressive intervention of state power. Then it withers away. When it becomes superfluous, it withers away.

Kluge

That means, on the one hand it can happen when people organize autonomously, which would need to occur separately in each area of life. That means, they organize how they learn; they organize their nutrition and their production. They organize their interactions with other nations. That’s how it works, right? And in each instance, the form of organization would look different. It would be more diverse than the state. There would not simply be 10 to 12 state departments, but the system would include an infinite variety of self-organization. That’s one direction. The opposite direction would be: The state becomes superfluous because it is superimposed by something like the mafia. Is that correct? In that case, it would also wither away, but due to overexploitation.

Negt

Yes, it means there is a process of re-feudalization, like in certain systems where the mafia takes over state functions, for example tax collection or … like from what I heard in Königsberg, where people told me that the mafia plays an important role in sanctioning contracts. No one honors contracts, but the threat of the mafia, these mafia-like groups, they enforce contracts by means of levies.

Kluge

And that is actually a pre-bourgeois constellation, it’s like a medieval society before the emergence of the modern state.

Negt

Exactly, and of course that also means, according to the medieval principle: protego ergo obligo, which means, I protect you, therefore you are bound to me. And that’s a dangerous suspension of the state, a dangerous suspension of the state. In this case, the state doesn’t simply wither away because its functions are reintegrated into society, into civil society. Instead, we see the formation of a state-like monopoly which might ultimately even gain sovereignty by establishing its own police force. And the privatization of certain state functions leads to a problematic suspension of the monopoly of the state.

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WHERE does the expression LEFT come from?

Kluge

Where does the concept of the left in a political sense come from?

Negt

It has undergone different valuations. Initially it was simply a spatial position: The Mountain, la Gironde, the Center, the Marsh, that means it referred to a seating order …

Kluge

So the Mountain, the Jacobins, were sitting on the left of the amphitheater, where the national convention …

Negt

… convenes, where the national convention comes together, and initially it is not associated with a specific value. The word, the expression gained its specific value in the 1820s, when the Party of Order was sitting on the right to emphasize their rightful title relating to order. The rebellious revolutionaries, the former revolutionaries, that means everyone who questioned the status quo, were pushed to the seats on the left, and now they develop a positive understanding of the term left. That’s when left really starts to become an identity, a political identity that extends beyond a mere seating order. So with the emergence of the Chartist movement in England, with the beginning of the workers’ protests, the workers’ movement, a positive understanding of the concept of the left develops as well.

Kluge

And in the 20th century?

Negt

The left, and freedom, and socialism, and all those terms associated with it, are very much charged with the idea of a critique of existing society and the government, so that the left in all its different incarnations can be distinguished in its self-conception fairly clearly from all the right-wing parties. A devaluation of the right is what happens in the 20th century.

Kluge

How would you recognize a right-wing person? What’s the common denominator?

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Oskar Negt, sociologist

Negt

First of all simply that someone on the right …

Kluge

… is always more right-wing than someone on the left.

Negt

It’s always a constellation of right vs. left, so there are … yes, a number of behaviors and traits that affirm certain interests, for example to consider the existing order as the rightful and right order, and to think of anything that questions this order as the position of an enemy, an opponent.

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KEYWORD: GLOBALIZATION / What would Adam Smith say?

Kluge

Keyword Globalization. What does that entail? That’s another thing that puts the nation state at risk. Superimposes it.

Negt

Yes. The organization of the nation state in the 18th and 19th centuries is essentially a process that contains the civil-war-like tendencies of a territory. And the bourgeois society that emerges from it has always had a regulatory function opposite the capitalist processes of production and exchange determined by globalization. That means, the inherent mechanism, the inherent law of capitalist accumulation is globalization. Which is clearly stated in the “Communist Manifesto.” Like no one else, Marx said: Capitalism has the tendency to take root everywhere in the world and to form a global society. The market is everywhere. And even things like world literature can be a consequence of this process. He didn’t define this process as purely negative.

Kluge

It’s a planet-wide form of intelligence.

Negt

And it also helps to overcome narrow-mindedness, local narrow-mindedness. But at the same time, until 20, 30, 40 years ago, this process of globalization was restricted by regulations of the state, the social state. State regulations in regard to commerce – that means, certain customs boundaries, certain trade restrictions that the state stipulated.

Kluge

The nation state absorbs the interests of its citizens, redefines them, and upholds them against the market. That’s how you could say it, right?

Negt

Yes, outwards and inwards. In an outwards-facing direction in regard to free trade, the limits of free trade, and inwards-oriented is the component of the welfare state, which of course has been shaped heavily by unions’ battles and the workers’ movement. But the nation state appropriates it. These social achievements are officially sanctioned by the social state. But today, globalization means that these boundaries fall apart outside the context of capitalist logic. The anchoring function of the social state as well as – and that’s just as bad – the fact that capitalism, because it was faced with a kind of competition after the October Revolution, always had to focus on being better and freer, to have freer citizens, safer citizens, less worried citizens. But this reality of distinction opposite the Eastern Bloc has fallen away. Now we live in an era that none of the bourgeois economists would have thought possible, where capitalism is free of any restrictions or barriers, free of all bite inhibitions as well. That’s another element of globalization. In that sense, globalization also functions as blackmail material. If you don’t lower the wages, if you aren’t happy with our stipulations, we can go somewhere else. That doesn’t actually happen, but these threats of globalization make for powerful public blackmail material.

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Oskar Negt, sociologist

Kluge

If we put ourselves in Adam Smith’s shoes, the great national economist at the turn to the 19th century. How would he have thought about globalization in positive terms? For example, if we talk about the problem that South America can basically do what it wants in regard to its economic flows and its productivity. But someone who was born there will never have the same chances as someone who was born in an industrial region in Europe, crisis or not. Africa, with its one percent participation in the global market, simply cannot have equal opportunities – so that the idea of unequal birthright reappears on a global scale and in a way that’s very different from the concept in the French Revolution.

Negt

The idea of the invisible hand, the invisible hand that regulates the market, has always been interpreted very carefully by Adam Smith himself. He didn’t believe it would always work, that competition between private interests would always lead to the regulation of society as a whole.

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THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE, what is that? / Oskar Negt on: Globalization as blackmail material