The Challenge for the Left: Reclaiming the State

Abstract

For the most part, left thinkers have become reconciled to the image of the state as a demoralized bureaucratic machine that is unable to carry out effective management and which merely swallows taxpayers' money. It has to be recognized that such images do not appear out of thin air. But in most countries it was not the left that created the state bureaucracy, even if the left figures in the consciousness of millions of people as the servant and defender of bureaucracy. At the same time the right effectively exploits for its interests both the annoyance of citizens with the state, and their no less powerful demand that the state defend them against foreign threats. Such threats more and more often turn out to consist not of hordes of foreign warriors, but of mountains of foreign goods, crowds of half-starved emigrants, and a mafia that is rapidly internationalizing itself - in short, the natural consequences of the economic policies pursued by the right itself. The problem of the state becomes insoluble for the left from the moment when it rejects the idea of the radical transformation of the structures of power. The established state structures start to appear unshakeable. They can either be accepted or rejected. On the symbolic level, many on the left do both. Practical politics, which unavoidably give rise to constant changes in state structures and institutions, becomes a monopoly of the right. The democratization of power and the participation of the masses in decision-making cannot in themselves guarantee that social reforms will be successful. But if progressive social forces, on coming to power, do not begin promptly to democratize the institutions of the state, this can only end in the degeneration and ignominious collapse of left governments.