The Dregs of States

Unlike most of my contemporaries, I simply hate the mafia. I hate everything that has to do with the mafia, including fictional representations of it in cinema, television, and video games. I am regularly forced to report ads for Mafia Wars on a certain social-networking site as 'offensive' (ads for KY Jelly, in turn, are dutifully denounced as 'irrelevant'). I hate so much as thinking about casinos, Teamsters, cocaine, construction firms, since these all invariably carry with them a further thought of the mafioso who makes them his business. I hate hearing imitations of Sicilian bosses doing their schtick (threatening to kill people in a funny accent), which are almost always imitations of Christopher Walken doing imitations of Sicilian bosses.

Most of all I hate it when earnest students of mine invoke omertà as an example of a moral code, as having a laudable principle at its core even if in its application it leads to regrettable consequences. Each time this comes up I think to myself: don't students read The Stranger anymore? Or do the 'classics' that inform their moral reasoning extend back only as far as The Godfather and Scarface (I admit I made it through the first of these, but only as a Coppola completist; I have never seen a single episode of the Sopranos, and the earliest memory I have of being repulsed by the whimsical representation of organized crime was Wise Guys, the horrid Brian de Palma film of 1986 starring Billy Crystal and Danny De Vito). I would greatly prefer to engage in a discussion about morality with a student contemplating the possibility of random, lone, unprovoked murder, than with one who thinks unquestioning group loyalty represents any sort of moral accomplishment at all. Omertà is for stunted cretins, I want to say, now get that Godfather poster off your dorm-room wall and start reading some Camus or some Nietzsche.

There was another big mafia hit in Montreal this week, as a major parrain montréalais was gunned down in his own home. Predictably the female enablers of the clan showed up in the newspapers looking indignant, flashing gold crosses around their necks, talking on cellphones in front of their bloated pre-fab mansions. Why anyone would find this culture worthy of glorification in TV and movies is truly beyond my comprehension (the TV romances portray these women as victims of fate, as born into it and thus unable to do anything about it; but they damn well can do something about it: they can run away, they can choose to construct their lives autonomously). I am unable to understand, but not at all because I have no appreciation for the power of violence in art and myth. I am right there with Ernst Jünger when he describes the sublimity of trench warfare, and I am no stranger to Gothic tales of torture and bloodsucking either. But these have to do with transgression against ordinary morality, whereas organized crime is about the redoubling of the very most ordinary morality: it's patriotism for people too small-minded and provincial to think about loyalty to the nation.

And this brings me to my real point. I mentioned recently that one of the concerns that often holds me back from publicly identifying myself as an anarchist is this: although I would very much like to see nation-states wither away, I am generally concerned that bands of thugs would move right into the vacuum of state power. But recently I've been wondering whether such bands are not rather the product --or, better, a by-product-- of the existence of more legitimate systems of rule with relatively more legitimate claims to a right to exercise coercive violence. We tend to think of organizations like the mafia as operating against the state, but what if they are in fact operating in imitation of the state, as a sort of trickle-down, derivative reflection in folk culture of a modus operandi that is exemplified par excellence by the state?

It's true that mobsters and warlords tend to thrive most where states function least. But this fact does not necessarily mean that human beings only ever have a choice between states and thugs. It seems to me that it's at least possible --and I'm sure there is plenty of scholarship both empirical and theoretical pertaining to this suggestion, about which less dilletantish students of politics might be able to inform me-- that the thriving of state-like violence cartels within certain states is a sort of jockeying for power in which the under-performing state is one of the players, not the eternal enemy and opposite of the sub-state players.

Would sub-state violence continue in a vacuum of state power? One thing we know is that there is a fairly tight connection between modes of production on the one hand, forms of social organization on the other, and, finally, characteristic expressions of communal violence on the third hand. Hunter-gatherer societies had no standing armies, and engaged in no wars of expansion; their 'wars' were limited to cyclical revenge-based raids on neighboring groups. Wars of expansion began with pastoralism; as many scholars have noted, the current ethnic make-up of Eurasia was determined by nothing more heroic than the cattle-rustling campaigns of steppe dwellers. Standing, professional armies only came with the rise of states, and the idea that a soldier should be a 'citizen' of the state for which he fights, rather than a mercenary, is a very recent development, and likely not a permanent one. 

State violence develops in a continuous line out of clan-based violence as sociocultural complexity increases. The state does better and at a larger scale what tribal raiders and mafiosi seek to do at a smaller scale. Such groups would indeed probably keep doing this in the absence of state power, but I see no obvious reason why the absence of state power should be a particular boon for mobsters and warlords who are currently limited in their exercise of violence by pesky law-enforcement efforts. At present, we have mafia violence and state violence. Whatever we may learn from science and history about human nature, and about the sinister designs that groups of humans spontaneously come up with, it remains a fact that states are vastly more violent than sub-state actors like the mafia that they are officially charged with keeping in check. It is unlikely that thuggish violence would disappear in the absence of states (just as early cattle rustlers did not need state support in order to settle a continent), but in the present situation states do set a fairly high standard of coerciveness for mobsters and thugs to emulate.

Anyone who has seen the special paramilitary stations in Rome dedicated to 'antimafia' operations, with the word 'antimafia' carved into thick stone columns outside their gates, cannot help but notice that there is a certain structural pas de deux going on here, that the two sides need each other and legitimate each other. One also cannot help but think that any state that would think to immortalize its antimafia activity in marble columns is a pretty crappy excuse for a state: a state that permanently acknowledges the reality of sub-state violence cartels in its midst, and in this way sets itself up as merely one center of coercion among others. How much healthier is the state that has no need for such institutions! And how much healthier, to push this thought to the limit, is the 'state' that has no need for coercion of any sort.

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Comments

[mtraven]

You might actually like The Sopranos, which is sort of the anti-Godfather -- it deflates the romantic image these thugs have of themselves and reduces them to the petty guys from New Jersey that they actually are. Of course, it also makes them the protagonists of a five-season-long television series. The creators of the series had a constant struggle between getting the audience to empathize with the characters while tearing them down.

"...the TV romances portray these women as victims of fate, as born into it and thus unable to do anything about it; but they damn well can do something about it: they can run away, they can choose to construct their lives autonomously"

A key moment in the series comes when a psychiatrist tells Carmela Soprano (wife of the boss, female lead of the show) exactly that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwkeJFNFJJE

"...that there is a certain structural pas de deux going on here, that the two sides need each other and legitimate each other."

I think this is an instance of a more general phenomenon, where elements on both sides of a conflict use the existence of enemies (and inflate their strength) to strengthen their own position. You can see it in the US where the defense/security industry used the supposed threat of al Qaeda to bloat itself by hundreds of billions of dollars. Charles Tilly (I think) coined the useful term "violence entrepreneurs" for such people; I talk about it sporadically on my blog, like here: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2009/05/nonviolence-entrepeneurs.html

[ben w]

Tilly also wrote about war-making and state-making as organized crime, and there is (or so I believe) a lot of literature on the state-like role of organized crime. (One could easily flip your imitation and have states be imitators of bands of thugs.)

but I see no obvious reason why the absence of state power should be a particular boon for mobsters and warlords who are currently limited in their exercise of violence by pesky law-enforcement efforts.

People will still want the things the state provides, and mobsters (whose goals aren't simply to be violent for its own sake) will step in and provide them.

[South Asian]

There was an interesting book on this topic: The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government by Thomas N. Bisson (Princeton University Press). It was reviewed (Lords of ‘Pride and Plunder’) by Robert J. Bartlett (New York Review of Books, June 24, 2010).

A relevant excerpt:

"The rulers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were trained in, and glorified, war, and expected to live off it, as well as off the tribute of a subjugated peasantry. If such rulers formed “the state” of their day, what are the implications? The state engages in violence; it takes away our property. How then does it differ from a criminal enterprise? This was a question that went back at least as far as Saint Augustine in the fourth century:

What are robber gangs, except little kingdoms? If their wickedness prospers, so that they set up fixed abodes, occupy cities and subjugate whole populations, they then can take the name of kingdom with impunity.

Augustine’s ponderings stem from the worrying doubt that states and kingdoms, indeed all lawfully constituted governments, are just the most successful of the robber gangs. This idea, that the state and the criminal gang are but larger and smaller versions of the same thing, was one recurrent strand in medieval thinking."

We used these ideas to explore the social patterns in South Asia today:

http://thesouthasianidea.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/governance-in-south-asia-states-and-robber-gangs/

[Kai Matthews]

"I want to say, now get that Godfather poster off your dorm-room wall and start reading some Camus or some Nietzsche."

Or off the wall of the office of the Concordia Student Union president. (It's probably gone now, since the last student elections in which I participated.)

Perhaps of a kind with Che Guevara t-shirts? (I'm generally unpopular with doctrinaire leftists on the few occasions when I point out the relish with which Che, after the revolution, personally executed enemies.)

[Thephilosophersbeard.blogspot.com]

I think it is pretty clear that organised crime wouldn't do very well under anarchy. But that is because it is parasitical on the organisation of a state rather than an imitator of the state. Parasites can of course be competitors with their hosts for resources - like tapeworms in the gut - but they cannot prosper alone.

Organised crime makes vast amounts of money by cheating. That requires some generally followed rules that they define themselves against (through their alternative omerta system?) and thereby create profitable economic niches. The way to success is to get 2 billion dollars worth of garbage disposal contracts from various municipalities across the EU and then dump the garbage for free in the countryside around Naples.

PS I'm not sure about your socio-political theory of war - Margaret Meade for example pointed out that there are lots of counterexamples to it (see her "Warfare is Only an Invention -- Not a Biological Necessity")

[omar]

The state and the thuggish band are both developments in the history of human social organization. It is good to deflate their propaganda about themselves, but the fiendish next stage is probably being prepared as we speak....And since nothing ever disappears, some mutated forms of these evils will also continue to hang around.

[Jonathan Halvorson]

Justin, I share your detestation of the mafia and organized crime in general. The same visceral dislike extends well into the corporate world and the organized corruption and exploitation of the unorganized or uninformed.

The mob, in whatever form, is criminal only in relation to the laws of a state. Without the state, the mob simply is the de facto authority, if it can dominate a region. If it cannot, it engages in warfare until it is defeated or becomes the de facto authority. I am still in the camp that says political power abhors a vacuum. At least, as long as homo sapiens yet walks the earth.

It is true that if the nation state disappears for a time each individual successor organization is likely to have domain over a smaller population and have fewer resources with which to oppress, but there will also be more such entities and the control exercised may be just as strong on a per capita basis. If technology and access to mechanized instruments of power decline, then (and here I think Foucault was right) the mob-state will engage in greater displays of power in order to maintain control where it cannot surveille. The mob loves a massacre to show who is boss.

Even if it is true that in general the scale of warfare and organized mayhem would decline, don't forget that it is extremely likely that so would the quality of life as measured in things like access to technology, medicine, global travel, food choices, etc. That may be a price you are willing to pay, but it is a price.

For an alternate model that retains nation states, you might want to look at the least corrupt societies to see what social and political elements seem to inoculate the best against organized crime. The following is a start, though its focus is on governmental corruption so doesn't really get at what you're talking about. http://www.worldbank.org/html/prddr/trans/j&a96/art8.htm.
What the nations at the top of the list all share is that they're kind of boring. Within the US, I'd bet my home state of Minnesota is near the top.

[Merryjeremiad.wordpress.com]

Similar to the comment by South Asian, I have tended to think about states more as evolved gangs, different in scale and sophistication but not so different in nature.

Works of James C. Scott and Peter Leeson come to mind on this question. Both have participated in interesting conversations at Cato Unbound that are worth checking out. Scott's was just a couple of months ago and can be found at http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/september-2010-seeing-like-a-state-a-conversation-with-james-c-scott/.

Leeson's was back in August 2007 and can be found at http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/august-2007/. His entry titled "The Feasibility of Anarchy" might be most pertinent.

Nonetheless, the idea of gangsters reflecting the order of the state is compelling. It occurs to me that there might be a bit of a feedback loop wherein gangs developed into early iterations of states, which evolved they're own idiosyncrasies, which gangs in turn emulated and so on over the centuries.

[Picador]

@Jonathan Halvorson:

"Even if it is true that in general the scale of warfare and organized mayhem would decline, don't forget that it is extremely likely that so would the quality of life as measured in things like access to technology, medicine, global travel, food choices, etc."

I would go farther than this. I have a great deal of sympathy for anti-statist sentiments, but this sort of anarchist social theory is so profoundly speculative that one should probably take a close look at the historical and anthropological data on violence in stateless groups when forming a position. These data, unfortunately, paint a grim picture: hunter-gatherers tend to die violent deaths at vastly higher rates than people in industrialized societies. Despite the mass genocides and scorched-earth warfare we've seen in the last 100 years, the numbers suggest that rates of violent death have in fact declined dramatically over time. Living outside of state regulation seems to be a recipe for blood feuds, raiding parties, fatal brawls, and general instability and insecurity caused by inter- and intra-tribal aggression.

Perhaps some anarchists argue that the genius of the state is its ability to apply violent coercion without killing too many people, and that the rates of violent death therefore don't reflect the actual levels of violence experienced by industrialized man; this certainly seems like a plausible argument. But in the absence of any empirical support, the actually avialable data on violent deaths should be soberly considered by any prospective anarchist.

All of this is to say, yes, the state is not different in kind from organized crime families or the ethnic community mutual aid societies who serve as their public faces. When existing in parasitism with the state, the mafia can jettison its community-regulatory functions and be more exclusively predatory; if the state were to evaporate, the mafia would no doubt find itself doing a much higher volume of legitimate business and regulation like any other feudal structure. This is exactly the reason I'm not a hard-core anarchist: whatever you want to call it, some sort of tribal structure is going to govern you as long as you're a member of homo sapiens, and the numbers suggest that the current structure actually kills fewer people than the older ones. This might not be an airtight argument in favor of the status quo, but it's a pretty good counterargument to reflexive anti-statism in the absence of any data supporting the other side.