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i dont think you understand what the state does, cimmaron, and on that basis you try to reduce "questions" concerning it and its actions to pretty simplisitic polarities (good/bad). maybe this follows from one's understanding of the history of capitalism itself, which is quite different from the fantasies about capitalism that have been outlined in political economy texts over the past couple hundred years. on that basis, you seem not to understand how to look at the state: when baraka guru says that the state is in a basic way a democratizing force, the way to look at that is that at the running of the state is determined by elections (whatever you may think of them, and i am personally pretty cynical about them in the present american context) which introduces at least at the level of principle a form of accountability to the electorate. neoliberal arguments attempt to parallel corporation to shareholder relations, but that's only superficially accurate---shareholders may hold corporations accountable, but who gets to be a shareholder is a matter of class position. this has fuck all to do with basic citizenship rights and everything to do with economic class. some notion of laissez faire capitalism amounts to an evacuation of political control or accountability, a flight from the public (in the sense of the electorate, the citizenry) and it's replacement with the private, which is not accountable to the citizenry. what liberal political economy tries to do to obscure this fact is basically to equate economic demand and political freedom---but they're basically different.
this is a philosophical difference.
the more pragmatic differences between your position and, say, mine, follow from the extent to which one introduces the history of actually existing capitalism into one's understanding of what the state has been, how it's changed, what it's functions are and whose interests it serves. in a nutshell (god how i hate that cliche)...without the modern state propping it up, capitalism would have collapsed long ago. it is not a socially or politically functional system. it generates continual instability while it's own functions presuppose continual stability, or at least a minimal stability, enough so that there are people willing to produce goods and people able to consume them. the state has developed through a sequence of stages primarily as an elaborate mechanism that mediates this basic tendency toward instability. to see this, all you have to do is look at the history of capitalism as a social system since, say, the 1870s, so since the introduction of public stock trading. which is the point that you start to see very large scale mass-production oriented corporations as the dominant form of capitalist production--so the point at which the viewpoints of hayek, von mises and the tradition of liberal political economists they stand in for become quaint.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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