The following is the opening article of the second issue of The New Leveller. For a PDF of the entire issue, click here. For HTML versions of each individual article, click here.
WHO IS THE GOVERNMENT?
Last July, President Barack Obama chided those who spent their time criticizing government, saying “in this democracy, we the people recognize that the government belongs to us.” For that reason, he argued that “we all have a stake in government’s success, because the government is us.”
Even among those who disagree with him on other political matters, that sentiment is ubiquitous. When we push it to its logical conclusions, though, it starts to look a little odd.
Should we believe that when the National Guard opened fire on students at Kent State, those students committed suicide? Are the over 2.3 million inmates in American prisons just checking in for a vacation? On this month 29 years ago, the Philadelphia police dropped a bomb on a row house in order to attack the black liberation organization MOVE. The fire raged on, destroying 61 houses and killing 11 people. Was that just a standard demolition planned by and for the neighborhood to get rid of some houses they didn’t really want anymore?
Of course not.
That these people all held the right to vote clearly did not guarantee to them any meaningful control over how the government’s resources would be used. They were not the government, and they were kidnapped, shot, or burned alive by someone whose interests were not their own.
These are especially clear cases, and few (if any) State-defenders are willing to go as far as to say that democracies, by definition, can’t murder their own citizens. Even so, this logic is often applied to silence other complaints against the government.
For example, the idea that taxation is theft is often scoffed at as ridiculous. When taxation comes “with representation,” it’s understood as a perfectly normal service fee for uses already approved by those being taxed. Similarly, those who break laws are taken to be breaking rules we’ve already agreed upon as a society. Draft-dodgers are condemned for failing to sufficiently contribute to “their side” in a conflict. Resistance is seen not only as childish, but incoherent.
This is why the most advanced governments have come to accept democracy: it serves as a powerful ideological tool. Victims take on a false sense of control in the decision-making process, and thereby come to identify with their own oppression.
Taxation becomes your payment for projects you helped design. Fines and even prison time become the penalty for backing out of an agreement you yourself made. You’re taken half-way across the world to risk your life killing people who pose no actual threat to you or your loved ones – and this is understood as a duty of self-defense.
You learn to celebrate your own enslavement. After all, “we all have a stake in the government’s success, because the government is us.”
So, just who actually is the government?
It’s not you, it’s not me, and it’s not “we the people.” Some person or group of persons is clearly imposing their will on the rest of us and passing it off as a shared pursuit of the common good.
There are some obvious answers – in the United States, it definitely includes the President, the Senators, the Governors, the Generals, the Sheriffs, the Chiefs of Police, the Wardens, etc. It definitely does not include the common citizenry, whose votes serve only to give them a false sense of power.
Yet there are less obvious answers as well. Just because someone is or is not employed by the government does not settle the issue of whether they are or are not a part of the government in any meaningful sense.
Groundskeepers at the White House may receive a paycheck from the State, but they neither participate in its crimes against the public, nor have a voice in the planning of those crimes. They are no more a part of the government than those of us who drive on public roads.
In that same vein, there are plenty of nominally private individuals and organizations who use their power and influence to shape the government’s actions. When this influence is used to exploit the public, it is called “rent-seeking.” Due to their role in initiating the State’s aggression for their own benefit, consistent rent-seekers are best understood as a part of the government.
There are also nominally private individuals and organizations who not only direct and profit off the government’s crimes, but help commit them. These include military contractors like Blackwater (now known as “Academi”) and the operators of private prisons like Corrections Corporation of America.
What is shared by all those groups that are truly a part of the government (and what distinguishes them as such) is their role in committing systematic aggression against the public. The government is that institution in society which claims political authority over a given citizenry. What this means is that it maintains the right to unilaterally and unaccountably decide what is or is not aggression, and predictably gives itself a rubber stamp of approval fairly often.
At all times, it maintains a monopoly on the right to authorize violence and settle legal disputes. Even when it contracts that violence out to other firms, or allows some competition in legal services, it’s understood that this is done only to the extent that it pleases the State.
These qualities are found in all States in all places. They are found in both monarchies and in democratic republics. They describe the colonial authorities of an empire, and the governments installed by whatever revolutionaries overthrow them. They are present in not only overt dictatorships, but also in nations who pride themselves on their respect for the rule of law.
Always and everywhere, the State is the enemy of the public. It is their aggressor, and it is their exploiter.
Once recognized, this typically provokes a sense of outrage. It should. Yet it should also be a cause for relief.
You have not caged millions of people and robbed them of their humanity. You have not kept entire classes of people in poverty. You did not drop the atomic bomb.
Their borders are not your borders, and their wars are not your wars. Their crimes are not your crimes, and their guilt is not your guilt. The violence they commit in your name does not come from your hands.
No longer will we let them say otherwise.