Why they let us

To answer this question from the Marxist frame, we will turn to Charles Tilly. Though Tilly is not a Marxist in any sense, he does approach the question of state formation from a decidedly materialist position. In his State Formation as Organized Crime, Tilly argues that the first states were formed when a robber-baron class took over early agricultural settlements and forcefully taxed the farmers. In order to protect these stolen villages from other robbers, part of those taxes were dedicated towards defense, and eventually, conquest. This fits well into a strictly Marxist understanding of class relations, with the robber-barons effectively becoming a feudal aristocracy.

Once these states are formed, we come to Tilly’s second main thesis: “Wars make states, and states make war.” Best imagined as a Darwinian petri dish, Tilly’s contention is that these proto-states entered into competition with each other, and only the strongest survived. In order to “make states,” there needs to be a class capable of extracting resources from its society. And, in order to “make war,” that class needed to expand its coercive and extractive capabilities. The states which were best able to extract resources gained an advantage in war, and consequently, survived. Those states which failed to extract as efficiently ceased to exist. Given eons of human history, we find that the nation-state outcompeted most every rival, and came to dominate the geopolitical ecosystem.

But again, we return to our primary question. Even if the nation-state is the ideal exploitative form, why the liberal nation-state? Why allow your population to vote if they might vote to lessen your coercive capabilities? To answer this final question, we turn to Ivan Krastev.

In From Politics to Protest, Krastev imagines a government facing a strange crisis. Suddenly, in the course of an election cycle, more than 80% of the population has decided not to vote — or rather, to turn in blank ballots. Taking his words:

The government’s frantic attempts to get its hands on the ringleaders of the blank-vote conspiracy ended in frustration and despair. It turned out that behind the blank votes were neither ideologists nor organizers. Nor was it a conspiracy, having been neither planned nor prepared. It was not even tweeted. The only rational explanation was that a majority of the people at one and the same time (and each separately from all the others) had arrived at the idea of dropping a blank ballot into the urn. As a result, there was no one for the government to negotiate with, no one to arrest, and no one to target with efforts at blackmail or cooptation. After a week of anxiety, the authorities reran the election. But this time, 83 percent of the ballots were left blank (1).

This scenario challenges us because it is clear that this is a crisis for the government — that sudden protest-voting on this scale presents a threat to the regime — but it isn’t clear why. That is to ask, why should this government care if eighty percent of its people fail to vote? Kastev’s answer is simple: refusing to vote is threatening because voting prevents revolution.

A Bread Riot in pre-revolutionary France

To Krastev, elections are “celebrations of powerlessness.” Citizens turn in their ballots without any real expectation that they are exercising power over the state, and often, are asked to respect the results of the election even when their power is directly diminished. In the days of feudal rule, bread and funeral riots would regularly confront the state as a direct threat, and coerce it into meeting their demands. Indeed, these actions sparked many bourgeois revolutions. Though modern strikes and uprisings parallel this tendency, they are a rarity, rather than a fact of political life. Today, instead of striking, we vote. Instead of rioting, we vote. Instead of revolting, we vote. Far from empowering a state’s people, voting disempowers them, and thus, allows for state coercion and extraction to go on uninterrupted.

And so we return to our central question: how can a Marxist explain the allowance of voting by bourgeois states? The simple answer is that elections are another mechanism of control. By allowing the people to vote, and then proceeding to ignore them, Putin and Trump are both able to exploit their people without consequence. Liberal democracies create a nonviolent arena for bourgeois politicians to debate the management of their affairs, while simultaneously pacifying the proletariat.

A more complex answer, taken in terms of Tilly’s model, sees that the liberal nation-state has succeeded in the geopolitical ecosystem because it is the government form which has thus far been able to extract the most resources from its people, and most easily direct those resources towards imperialism and war. Without fearing bread riots or lasting general strikes, the liberal state is able to levy burdens on its people that would be intolerable under feudal society. We work longer hours than peasants ever did, produce more, and accept a level of state control that has never existed before. Because Americans are by-and-large Hegelian in their understanding of the state, they are too mesmerized by ideas of voting and popular rule to realize that both are completely farcical.