exerpts
There is a governance
lesson in the way that Shanghai’s police manage the city’s underground: the
underground is useful. Consequently, there is an ideal level of crime in a
society and it is not zero. Competent governance requires making room for a
criminal underground. The competent ruler can leverage it to cement his hold on
power or to take power against a flailing state. Additionally, the underground
is a great place for rising political elites to learn the more fundamental
realities of power.
China is also where
Western liberal prejudices go to die. You can’t have prosperity under communist
rule, except if you can. You can’t have functional markets without the rule of
law, except if you can. You can’t have a criminal underground under a total
surveillance state, except if you can.
This modus operandi is
present in many countries under authoritarian rule and the criminal underground
is always party to the arrangement.
When the Shanghai
police refuse to enforce the law against certain actors within the city’s
underground, they are effectively making an exception. The government and the
police suspend the due course of the state’s judicial mechanism in an ultimate
act of sovereignty where the interests of the state are placed above its own
regular functioning.
It’s a good model, but
not a perfect one. The liberal state with a corporate political identity is
modern, but the coexistence of law and criminality is not. There are other,
older conceptions to draw on.
Another conception is
that of the extension of privileges. When the monarchies of 17th- and
18th-century Europe allocated letters of marque for disrupting shipping, they
were codifying a de facto exemption from the legal means of suppressing
international piracy. They withdrew their legal prerogative in order to grant a
distinct power to a subordinate. A personal-level “state of exception”
transformed into a legal privilege, once again for the superior interest of the
state. These mechanisms of suspension are necessary to the regular exercise of
political power. The recruitment of rogue elements for reasons of state has
historically been an integral part of these suspensions.
But what exactly are
these underground or rogue elements and what relationship do they have to state
power?
First, a little
structural analysis is necessary. What exactly is the underground “under” and
the state “over?” That middle is where the proper functioning of society
occurs, where people dwell, work, marry, reproduce, and die according to the
norms of what society considers worthwhile and respectable. This is the domain
of “normal” society: the working man, the middle classes, the local gentry, the
trades and major professions, and most of the bourgeoisie. It includes neither
society’s commanding heights, nor its deviants, outcasts, and criminals. This
is society’s core, not its outliers. Its members do not generate new sets of
norms much, but their role in upholding and socially reproducing norms means
that a real society-wide transformation isn’t complete until it wins over this social
majority. Once this happens, formerly radical or deviant sets of norms
themselves become the socially enforced and largely unquestioned markers of
basic respectability.
This middle section of
society is also where the immense majority of production happens, and thus
where the logic of production regulates life. Nearly all societies can be
divided between “productive” and “non-productive” sections. Even
hunter-gatherers have these distinctions, with the production done by the
hunters and the gatherers and the “lower” and “upper” elements represented in
the figures of the outcast on one hand and the shaman on the other. The former
is outside of the reproductive system by virtue of his exclusion and the latter
is outside of it by his proximity to the higher spiritual forms.
Just as production has
a logic of its own, so do the things which are excluded from it. This is true
regardless of whether they are “lower” or “higher” in relation to production.
The key distinction, in this case, is between productive and non-productive,
regardless of whether the latter groups are rejected by productive society as
filth or as transcendence.
Armed with this
expansive distinction, it becomes evident that the underground isn’t simply the
variety of criminal organizations that may operate under or outside the
auspices of productive and respectable society. It also encompasses all
elements which respectable society rejects as unclean, improper, or deviant.
The same goes with “higher” elements which are rejected as superior, elusive
values—praiseworthy, but not accessible to most people. The logic of production
has no use for warriors, criminals, poets, or aristocrats because it sees these
elements ultimately as either parasitic or disruptive to the processes of
production. Yet it encounters a major problem: the logic of production requires
the functioning of a coercive and administrative state.
The administrative
state is the productive state. It is where paperwork is processed, where
driver’s licenses are granted, roads are paved, and where all the functional,
algorithmic and mechanical processes of the state are hard at work. The
coercive state is where the higher transcendental processes which are concerned
with state violence and the mythos of legitimacy take place. It includes
monarchs and the traditions of monarchies, the armed forces, the secret and
not-so-secret police forces, esoteric aristocratic and technocratic rituals,
the charisma and magnetism of authoritarian leaders, the mandates of heaven and
the divine rights of kings, and the mystical and elusive “People” in republics.
If these
transcendental values do not exist, then the state does not exist, and state
violence withers away by virtue of being unable to motivate itself. Paved
roads, driver’s licenses, and paperwork are great, but no one is going to die
or kill for them. The state, in its intrinsic capacity to coerce, requires
these higher elements to even exist. All states are a mixture of both, but the
nature of the regime in place determines the balance of these two parts.
It is at the level of
transcendental authority and of the mystical and coercive elements of the state
that the link between the underground and the state becomes clear. The warrior
and the thug are reflections of each other. So are the liege lord and the crime
lord, protection rackets and feudal dues, highwaymen and nomadic hordes, the
courtesan and the prostitute, gangs and armies. Both the ruler and the kingpin
have to operate based on personal codes proving their word, their authority,
and their power—the former because he creates and enforces laws and the latter
because he operates outside them. Neither simply follows them like a normal,
productive citizen. Each of these binaries demonstrates upper and lower
manifestations of the same phenomena.
This implies that law
and criminality are not just intertwined conceptually, but structurally and
socially as well. Are criminals so very distant from aristocrats? Can
criminals, in fact, be aristocrats? Beyond being useful to the state, the
underground has an intimate relationship with state power by virtue of its
inability to be assimilated into productive society. The underground is made of
the same raw material as the coercive, transcendent state
These two extremes of
social order have a close relationship to one another, one that raises eyebrows
and even elicits condemnation from the broad and respectable middle—and should,
since normal lawful conduct is the middle’s function. But it is, in fact, also
necessary for social functioning. This is why we cannot differentiate so
starkly between the upper classes and the downtrodden ones, between aristocrats
and brigands, or between those who make the laws and those who exist beyond
their reach. These categories can suddenly shift, with today’s criminal
becoming tomorrow’s statesman or philanthropist—a pattern which played out many
times among American elites through the generations, from the pirate-descended
Vanderbilts to the bootlegging Kennedys.
Many modern nations
have, at their source, ethnic criminal gangs. This is true of the raiding
Northmen who became the dukes of Normandy and laid the foundations of modern
England, as well as of the Frankish armed bands who lie at the origin of
Charlemagne’s empire and of the French and German nations. In periods of
decline, peripheral classes like criminals or barbarians often become a source
of order, later translating into renewed authority. Since they survive by doing
what the state and respectable, law-abiding institutions cannot do, they find
themselves in a useful position when these the administrative organs of
overstretched states go into sepsis. The governors of Roman Gaul integrated the
Frankish bands into the security apparatus of the state, but these rogue
elements outlasted the collapse of the administrative Roman state. Similarly,
French kings bestowed titles on Northmen leaders and recruited them for defence
against other roving gangs. This unity of the upper and lower is at the source
of the emergence of adaptable state structures in times of decline.
Since the coercive
part of the state follows the same logic as the roving gang by virtue of their
niche outside of productive society, as soon as the lower elements acquire
productive societal structures, especially the core economic ones, they are
very easily able to embody the superior values of the state. This was the exact
process of transcendence that was behind the emergence of the legitimate states
of the early middle ages.
You cannot rule from
behind excel sheets. Only an infusion of this transcendental imperative can
achieve the goals of a truly great state. The tragedy of the modern discourse
on power is that it completely ignores this element. This ignorance misleads us
into unproductive intellectual territory. It may come as a shock to some, but
codifying your laws into the blockchain is not going to resolve the crisis of
competence that we find ourselves in. In fact, it might be time to look in the
other direction.
Not only the
underworld, but also many other unpatrolled sections of society present
interesting possibilities in terms of the emergence of new elites that can take
on the mantle. As we have seen in the previous cases, a functioning and
cohesive political order needs to be fundamentally alienating towards the
productive orders of society because in defining, motivating, and defending
that productive order, it necessarily acts outside of it on a more fundamental
reality. When these elements atrophy, they need to be renewed from other
sources. A Thug-Emperor to upend the American constitutional order and re-found
a new industrial state may or may not be in the cards, but there are other
lessons to be drawn.
“The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me ?”
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