The US is not a failed state
Apologies for the lateness of this post. My partner gave birth last Thursday to a tiny human named Thisbe Gilbert Ronen-Backer, and I’ve been accordingly occupied. I want to keep writing though! It helps me keep my head above water somehow.
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I've been hearing some socialists, like Seth Ackerman, say that the US is a failed state and others on social media saying it’s end times for the economy.
I disagree with both.
Let's think about what a state is generally and what the US state is, in particular. I study Althusserian marxism, so that's my go-to theory of the state. That theory says the state (when it comes to a ruling class keeping its position in struggle with subordinate classes) is a superstructure made up of two big parts: a repressive part and an ideological part.
The repressive part exerts a violent force, whether physical or non-physical to ensure hegemony and the ideological part recruits subjects to maintain continuity of hegemony. A successful state, very minimally speaking, means a ruling class can make interventions in these two ways with enough success to ensure and maintain their position. While subordinate classes can make interventions on these terrains of struggle, the ruling class keeps the upper hand.
The US state, by this simple measure, is nowhere near failed. Even to speak of the 'US state' in the singular is very misleading. There are at least three layers of repressive apparatuses: federal, state, local--each with court systems, police, prison systems. These layers are all up and running and enforcing ruling class hegemony with some success. Certainly, the administration of one branch of the federal government is absurdly ineffective and clumsy right now. But Trump's administration is still exerting force on multiple fronts. In any case, even if the presidency was caput, that's, like, a very small (albeit powerful) sliver of the overall repressive array in this country. There's still state and local governments, not to mention the other branches of the federal government and the military.
You might counter (and rightly so) that courts are shut down, police forces are working under new restrictions, and prisons releasing some prisoners. Tax day is postponed and elections are mail-in. State and local governments are facing huge budget shortfalls. They'll have to restructure, defund programs, and go into more debt.
Okay, sure. But there are CARES act grants available, the Fed is on a spending spree providing loans to governments of all sizes, and, overall, the exogenous shock of the pandemic has these repressive practices on pause (or screen-saver mode, as Jim Grant says), not weakened to the point of ineffectivness. These layers of the repressive apparatus are by no means failed. The police are still arresting people. The military is still active at home and abroad. Millions of people are encarcerated. Governments at every level are meeting, deliberating, enacting. Political parties are even engaged in campaigning, albeit in altered ways.
But that's just the repressive apparatus.
Some ideological apparatuses are seriously impacted, sure. Schools are closed. That's probably the biggest one. But a lot of students at all levels are doing online learning, so are the schools shut down? Not entirely. The school apparatus still exerts a non-zero force, just through computers and zoom.
Sports is sort of gone, except football's coming back, right? and wrestling? Music continues to be made and listened to. The family structure is stronger than ever probably as people rely on kinship networks to weather the storm, though of course I see new posts about parents and grandparents dying more frequently. I'm sure people are having sex, being romantic, but in frustrated ways. (I've seen couples getting back together after breaking up, doing long-distance relationships in the same city, etc). Media is churning and burning. There's so much news to produce and consume. New entertainment is harder to produce, but not impossible--and again is probably just on pause. An actor friend of mine has auditions in the fall, for instance.
Each of these ideological apparatuses deserves a separate analysis (just as the layers the repressive apparatus do), but a back of the envelope calculation shows nothing close to a failure of the whole or even parts of the US state. And we can tell because there's no revolution. The ruling class in the US is still very much in charge.
Think about France in 1789, the Spanish Viceroy system in Latin American in the early 1800s, Russia in 1917. These ended up as failed states. The US right now? I don't see it failing in the same way. Are there challenges for it? Absolutely. But one of its strengths is its decentralized, layered but coherent force, and global positioning. It's challenged but adapting.
That brings us to the second claim: the economy is in ruins. Again, what's an economy? In the Althusserian theory I know best, the economy is a set of modes of production where one is dominant. Each mode of production is a combination of relations of production and means of production.
The dominant mode of production in the US is capitalism. I'd say a test for a ruined economy would be the likelihood of changing relations of production. On this basic test, the US economy isn't ruined. There's little chance that relations of capitalist exploitation will wither, at least in the short term. Maybe they'll have a phase change, but I don't see any reason to think there will be a form change.
Most are saying this because of the employment numbers. There's good reason here, U6 unemployment is almost 23%. It's a bloodbath, and there are measures across the board that show the depth of the problems from the pandemic. Yet many of these measures are lagging indicators, not leading indicators. They're measuring the impacts of the crisis at its peak--which is due to a shutdown in March, a pause, a screen-saver, which is an important note. Things will eventually come back online, albeit in different forms. Phase change, not form change.
The economic crisis coming from this shut down is also very uneven. We all know the stock market is going up. Media companies are surging. Disney for instance: a lot of people are paying for Disney+, even as they're canceling their cruise and vacation plans (though Royal Caribbean reported recently that their cancel rate for 2021 is normal). Amazon is making more and more money. Musk's Fremont plant is back in business. Factories were repurposed for making emergency gear. Some industries are hiring. Redbook consumer levels are up.
Anything that gets sold on a grocery store shelf is in good shape. Dollar General chains are making more and more money. Distribution networks are stressed in terms of air and rail, but they're not entirely shut down. They're adapting. Truckers are still hauling stuff, though they have fewer places to stop and get a meal. Big corporations with lots of savings (think Apple) will come through this fine, and will have fewer costs due to layoffs from labor costs. Certainly there are strikes, but are these strikes grinding the mode of production to a halt? Not really. Plus the Federal Reserve is at its strongest maybe ever. The banks are liquid. There aren't big runs happening in markets anymore.
I don't see the economy as ruined. It's got a long road ahead. There's an ambiguous threat of inflation/deflation, which seems like the biggest storm cloud on the horizon. And indeed, the entire formation is at its weakest in recent memory. Certainly if there was an organized force from subordinate classes, it could give the ruling class a run for its money. But do you see the makings of that force? I don't (yet).
In sum, one thing that rarely comes up in these socialist comments about the 'failed' state and 'ruined' economy is the relationship between state and economy. The modes of production are a base upon which the state rests. The latter is a condensation of relations in the former. In each of the revolutionary periods I listed before, something goes terribly wrong with the society's material conditions and ruling classes can't make interventions with the superstructures in typical ways. The whole structure can and will buckle under the right conditions. There are conditions afoot in all regions of the US structure that could make it buckle. If you look at the US state and economy I don't see evidence for that yet.