It transpires that one of the
greatest discourses in our era of paradox is between ‘The State’ and the
potential for its underlying Oppression and/or Coercion. Without a doubt, the
citizens of liberal-democratic states today enjoy the benefits of secular
modernity. This includes a number of liberties citizens of other political
systems are not always afforded, such as freedom of speech, political and civil
rights, a division between the public and private spheres, dominance of the
rule of law, and so on. Indeed, by a number of strictly positivist measures, Finland, Sweden and Norway have been found to be in a condition of total freedom; in 2019 scoring the
maximum a state can be awarded, with a one-hundred percent aggregate freedom
rating.[1] Truly, we must have
entered an era defined by an “unabashed victory of economic and political
liberalism” in all its forms, whereby the actualisation of total freedom made
manifest is as plain as the nose on one’s face.[2]
As much as this may be so, freedom
always comes at a cost; it is not given but ascertained. The paradox however is
that here the fee was some of the very liberties usually associated with our
modernist understanding of ‘Freedom’. In this case, ‘Freedom’ can be loosely
defined in the lyrics of ‘Loaded’, a song by Primal Scream, evoking a sense of
interplay between action, personal will and external limitation: “we wanna be
free, we wanna be free to do what we wanna do”. How contradictory it is
however, that citizens of Liberal Democracies hold a number of freedoms, rights
and liberties, and yet live simultaneously within a legalised nexus of mass
surveillance the likes of which the Stasi could only have imagined in their
wildest of fantasmic dreams. This is also before discussing even the prowess of
social media providers, whose influence and data-harvesting slides through
legal loopholes and committee-led critique like a draft through Swiss cheese.
How paradoxical it is that some can praise a condition of freedom and love of
liberty in one breath, and then forcefully impose the mass-eviction of
protestors from common land in the name of ‘public health and safety’ with the
next.[3] Therefore, perhaps the
truism characterising the era as one of manifest liberal freedom is not a
truism at all - but rather just another blinkered understanding of the times.
This kind of political violence is,
however, not limited to just a small number of case studies. Across the inky
pages of the tabloid press, the airwaves of visual media and the silence of the
void they leave untouched, there is a vast array of examples illustrating the
hampering of individual freedom in our age of liberty. Off of the top of my
head, a number of examples could be: the aggressive use of rubber bullets
during the ‘Gilets jaunes’ protests in France, the violence against the Lakota
at standing rock, the use of force in suspending the Catalan independence
referendum, the fierce attempt to end the Euromaidan demonstrations in Ukraine,
state-sponsored violence against the Kurds, and so the list extends.
Even without the paradox of freedom
that we face in the contemporary era, history shows us that the use of violence
by a state against its own citizens is, sadly, commonplace. One has to think
only of the dictatorial regimes the twentieth century somehow became a partial
exercise in forging, upholding and dismantling. From the ancient commentators
of Polybius, Tacitus, and Thucydides to the common day, there has been a grand
dialogue concerning the connection between the polis or ‘The State’ and its use
of violence - by its own hand, against it, or even both.[4] This final category is
central to the paradox we see today and indeed all violence committed by a
political body against those who constitute its matter – its citizens. It is no
elephant in the room that political entities can, and occasionally do, employ
violence against their own citizens, often understood and referred to as ‘State
Coercion’ or ‘State Oppression’
It is here that we come to the
kernel of this piece. In order to judge such political violence and act
effectively, it is imperative that we forge some understanding of the political
phenomena unfolding in the world. In this case, the scope of this piece is not
to address the extent to which state coercion or oppression is excusable, moral
or unethical. Rather, my attempt is to provide some kind of grounds from which
state coercion and oppression may be grasped conceptually. From here, after
ascertaining some conceptual understanding, we can choose both individually and
as a citizen body to either accept or resist – but this can only be the case after we make the bold
and courageous decision to find some contingent grounds for understanding.
One of the greatest problems we
face in the modern world is a self-imposed aptitude for conceptual confusion.
In many ways, perhaps it has been forgotten that we use conceptualisations as
shorthand for phenomena. As time has ticked on it appears that we have been
using most of these conceptualisations in a very loose way, adding only to the
fog of our misunderstanding. When we use terms loosely, we make them a
‘conceptual umbrella’ under which we can put anything once connected to a
phenomenon’s wider experience.[5]
Take ‘Totalitarianism’ for example.
Totalitarianism is a concept signalling an exceptionally specific phenomenon
with equally specific political conditions. In this manner, Totalitarianism is
distinct from other systems such as ‘Tyranny’ or ‘Authoritarianism’, precisely
because each conceptualisation is shorthand for some phenomenal specificity.
Nevertheless, as all three of these phenomena share but a few core attributes,
they seem to be increasingly reduced to an interchangeable condition in our
discursive employment of these terms. This can only promote the extreme
reductionism of the thoroughly unsatisfactory and vague notion that ‘you will
just know a phenomenon when you see it’ or equally ‘what looks and smells like
a particular phenomenon is that phenomenon’.[6] Misunderstanding and
misinterpretation of political phenomena are all that lie at the end of that
particular path.
In our deeply uneasy times,
understanding and thinking about our collective condition requires the practice
of de-mystifying our phenomenological grasp by sharpening our conceptual tools.
In this light, some may contend that: “the moral and political philosopher who
thinks that conceptual clarification does not require deep empirical
investigation of the social world is not well enough informed to make
judgements about the possibilities of human social life”.[7] Without a doubt, this may
be the case. A certain level of empiricism cannot be ignored, as to ignore the
ontic (i.e. ‘that which is’) would be to equally neglect something of the phenomena
we seek to understand – the occurrences themselves. However, this being said,
to approach judgement without a sharp conceptual framework is to forego the
capacity for judgement all together; it is to be a portrait-painter who arrives
at the studio with mis-en-scene in place, one’s muse in position, a canvass
balanced atop an easel and yet without brushes, a palette or paints. It is to
forgo the capacity to think, understand, and in due course, to reflexively
judge “right from wrong, beautiful from ugly”.[8]
As I
have already stated above, it is beyond the scope of this piece to evaluate
state coercion and oppression as immoral, justified, unethical, excusable or
otherwise. The remainder of this piece will seek to sharpen our tools for
grasping the phenomena of state coercion and
oppression. Throughout the literature on the subject, ‘coercion’ and
‘oppression’ seem to have become interchangeable in their linguistic employment,
taking for granted that they are in fact one and the same phenomena.[9] In ‘Coercion, Space and the Modes of Human Domination’, Michael
Weinstein explains this issue flawlessly:
“While instances of coercion
overlap with instances of the other three modes of human domination, each mode
of domination has a distinct core. When the meaning of coercion is extended to
include the meanings of repression, suppression and oppression, important
theoretical and practical distinctions are lost”.[10]
From here, although I
will not shed any light on ‘repression’ or ‘suppression’, this piece will continue
by re-conceptualising ‘Coercion’ and ‘Oppression’ so to recast the distinction
between them - a distinction that is slowly fading into the mire alongside our
stake in phenomenological understanding. Finally, I shall offer a few summative
and concluding remarks at the close.
STATE COERCION
At the centre of modern political
theory rests the enquiry into the activity and experience of ‘The State’ at work, and for many defines the
differentiation between Political Theory and other modes of political
investigation.[11]
In this light, therefore, it would be considered bad etiquette not to ‘pass go’
without ‘The State’ in mind. For most commentators on the topic, The State as a
political unit denotes a certain level of coercion in the name of its own
interest inherently. In order to grasp this, we must place the spotlight on the
thoughts of the sociologist Max Weber, who in his 1919 lecture ‘Politics as a Vocation’ argued that at
the foundation of The State’s legitimacy was its intrinsic hold over the
capacity to coerce its citizens. Here, he discloses this by declaring:
“Nowadays, we must say that the
state is the form of human community that (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within
a particular territory – and this idea of ‘territory’ is an essentially
defining feature. For what is specific to the present is that all other an
organisation or individuals can assert to use the right to use physical
violence only insofar as the state
permits them to do so”.[12]
Here, Weber stresses that The State
is founded upon a sense of coercion, restricting citizens in their use of
violence by acquiring a monopoly on it – permitting violence on its terms only.
A
contemporary illustration exposing The State’s monopoly clearly, and is as such
easily recognised, was The State’s retort to the unrest during the 2017 ‘Unite
the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. In summary, the fractured
divisions of White Supremacy, Neo-Conservatism and the ‘Alt-Right’ gathered in
Charlottesville, protesting the removal of confederate monuments in response to
the Charleston Church Massacre two years previously. The rally was met by a
large number of ‘anti-fascist’ counter-demonstrators and quickly descended into
violence. In the unprecedented outbreak of violence the response of The State
was to disband the event by way of armoured officials and vehicles with ‘STATE
POLICE’ emblazoned on every surface. Here, the official rhetoric exclaimed
clearly that the use of violence had made the demonstrations an ‘unlawful
assembly’. Through such an action, Weber’s assertion was clear to transparent
view. The State did not permit the use of violence by its citizens, overtly
declaring it outside the boundaries of acceptable action and as such illegal –
removing individuals from the site of the event by force.
The
limitation of the capacity for individual violence by official means of
bureaucratisation, institutional imposition and, ultimately, force, does not
originate with Weber however, but is associated with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
Simply put, Hobbes argued in his ‘Leviathan’
that in order to save ourselves from the ‘State of Nature’ (a condition of
total liberty – a “War of everyone against everyone”- founded on our equal
propensity to kill one another, and where life is “Solitary, poore, nasty,
brutish and short”) we must surrender our liberty to a ‘common power’ and obey
in return for protection from our murderous passions.[13] Hobbes saw this forceful
surrendering of liberty to a sovereign body as the greatest of necessities by
the logic of the ‘common good’. Here, he argued that the fear of our natural
capacity to murder one another: “disposeth a man to anticipate, or to seek aid
by society: for there is no way by which a man can secure his life and
liberty”, as after all, for Hobbes, the greatest of common goods is the first
and fundamental ‘Law of Nature’ - “That every man ought to endeavour Peace, as
far as he has hope of obtaining it”.[14]
In this
sense, at its conceptual foundation, The State limits our individual capacity
to enact violence by its own force for some apparent ‘common ends’, and it is
this limitation which presents itself as a coercion. In a Libertarian or
Anarchist manner therefore, The State can be judged as a strictly coercive body, where coercion appears to
be the restriction and limitation of an individual’s natural condition of
absolute liberty.[15] The formulation of a
‘Social Contract’, as citizens surrendering liberty to a central body, exhibits
this the first impression of coercion –
the forceful application of restriction to some common ends.
Hobbes and
Weber fall into a mutual construction of explanation in this case. Hobbes
illuminates ‘the limitation’ and ‘imposition’ with an added emphasis on the
‘ends’, defined by him negatively by what it is not – a fall from grace to the state of nature. Weber, on the other
hand, elucidates the ‘use of force’ that is central to The State’s existence
and the reproduction of these very conditions of The State’s being. Together,
they compliment one another to shine a light on the intrinsically coercive
origins of The State’s existence.
Through Hobbes and Weber, we can see that ‘The State’ is inherently coercive by its restriction of individual liberty to some desired ends of a peaceful ‘common good’. In this manner, it would be only right to declare that an entity whose inception and institutional origins stem from a foundation of forceful limitation and taxing of liberty, cannot suddenly become a non-coercive entity.[16] At its conceptual heart, every state is founded on some violence in order to enforce its power as a sovereign and legitimate entity.
To expect this violence to dissolve into nothingness is asking for a leopard to change more than its spots, but its very existential condition as a mammal. Whatever the advantages of The State could be, specifically in protecting us from ourselves, its coercive tendency rests on the foundation of its monopoly of force in order to ascertain obedience, as Hobbes stresses. In this vein, “unless the coercer eventually sets up a regime that obtains obedience by adding some positive benefits, his regime must appear to the subjects as having no more claim on their obedience than a grizzly bear that has them up at tree”, and as such, “Only coercion can change enough individual calculations of net interest so as to stabilize the system”.[17] What does this conceptually reveal to us about coercion however?
The answer, it seems, rests in the dynamic between forced
‘restraint’ and ‘obedience’ for some apparent common interest. This
interrelation is what The State exhibitions when, for example, it forcefully
disbands public displays of violence as ‘unlawful’, or demonstrations as
‘breaching safety codes’, and so on. Beneath the surface, The State re-affirms
its own sovereignty, demanding by force our obedience so it can provide the
necessary protection it was created to uphold. By these means, as Christian Bay
explicitly connects the dots, coercion as the physical use of force implies:
“The
application of sanctions sufficiently strong enough to make the individual
abandon a course of action or inaction dictated by his own strong and enduring
motives and wishes.”[18]
What
Bay adds to the dialogue is the notion of ‘abandonment’. In this sense,
coercion is not simply the restriction of liberty, but the swaying of action
one way or another by force. In the example of the Charlottesville
demonstrations above, The State applied restrictions forcefully, and through
these means imposed obedience by swaying activists of all political stripes to
abandon a course of action – in this case, violent demonstration. Bay alludes
also to the enforced abandonment of ‘inaction’. A clear illustration of this is
conscription or ‘national service’. Here, citizens are required by legal
declaration to serve in the armed forced or face prosecution. This amounts to
punishment by The State for disobedience through inaction, and consequently, acts as a wider deterrent against the
potential undesired inactivity of citizens.
Interestingly,
all of the above share one quality, namely, The State’s forceful hold over the
political conditions within a given a territory – or quite literally – its hold over ‘the state of things’. In light
of this, maintaining
‘the state of things’ becomes the primary activity of The State
itself, and this predominantly requires the deterrence of dissent. Coercion as
such includes within its conceptual boundaries the ends of deterring dissent by
forcing obedience through a myriad of routes. As Hannah Arendt projects in her
essay ‘On Violence’, “Men can be
‘manipulated’ through physical coercion, torture or starvation, and their
opinions can be arbitrarily formed”.[19]
In order to provide what is in the interest of the common good, The State must
not only forcefully restrict our
liberties to implement obedience, but
must reproduce this condition of
obedience at every juncture in the name of the same common-good.
In
this sense, ‘manipulation’, as Arendt puts it, are the means which provide a
constantly re-invigorated obedience to The State, on both material and ideal
terms. As a citizen body, as a ‘Body Politic’, we are forcefully manipulated
into upholding the monopoly of violence that The State clutches by remaining
obedient to this same very entity. In short, this presents us with our second
impression of coercion – the forceful
application of manipulative restriction against citizens for some common ends.
Leading from this, although the notion
of ‘Power’ is an equally, if not more, convoluted concept (becoming
increasingly interchangeable with every other shorthand for some form of
domination with each day that passes), Stephen Lukes’ conceptualisation of
‘Power’ can add to our investigation into coercion and the national interest.
Here, he states that:
“A may exercise power over B by getting him to do what he does not
want to do, but he also exercises power over him by influencing, shaping or
determining his very wants. Indeed is not the supreme exercise of power to get
another or others to have the same desires you want them to have – that is, to
secure their compliance by controlling their thoughts and desires?”.[20]
Essentially,
Lukes adds to our conversation on coercion by stressing the violent but
non-physical dimension to The State’s manipulative capacity to remain
sovereign. Lukes signals the fact that coercion may be imperceptible to external
observers and, with this, unperceived by the very individuals upon whom force
is exercised for their compliance. Coercion remains violent through its
instrumental and mute character in demanding the coerced yield to the
potentially harmful utility of the implements one possess; thereby not
appealing to the public realm of appearances where speech, debate and
persuasion open up the potentiality of truly political action.[21]
This explains to a certain extent why rubber bullets, tear gas, water cannons
and batons are often complimented by legislation to restrict protests,
industrial action and student activism. These restrictions add to the
manipulative capacity of The State to remain sovereign and in control of its
citizens’
liberty.
Expanding on Lukes’ theory,
in her work Barbara Copinska reformulates the traditional understanding of
coercion to include this non-physical manipulation:
“In order to incorporate these
reflections, I propose a new tentative definition of state coercion as a
state’s rhetorics, actions, and institutional or legal arrangements compelling
individuals within its jurisdiction to act in desirable ways or restraining
them from diverging from the established way of living, without their
necessarily being aware of it”.[22]
Going one-step further than Lukes, Copinska
asks why it is that The State aims at manipulation in order to ascertain
obedience and compliance beyond the ends of some ‘common good’. The past
thought on coercion seemed to grossly overlook this crucial aspect. Here,
Copinska taps into a ‘divergence from the established way of living’ as the
impetus guiding manipulation. Following an increasingly critical perspective,
this impression of coercion emphasises the role of The State in upholding all
forms of the Status-quo. Primarily, this involves restricting the capacity for
genuine epistemic change by reproducing the conditions of The State’s political
necessity and its citizen’s conscious or unconscious dependence on this
condition.[23]
In
this way, by its own action The State reproduces a desired form of obedience
through both physical and non-physical force. The best illustration in the
‘Western World’ of precisely this is the idea of ‘Anti-Americanism’. A
conservative rhetoric often employed by those in support of the status-quo in
the United States of America, Anti-Americanism is a charge against those
individuals, groups or actions which defame or run counter to the principles,
values or policies of the American state. In this manner, critics and
demonstrators who are openly vocal against The State are themselves tarnished
with the label of being anti-American, coercing others consciously or not into obeying in the desired behaviour. On
this, the famous critic of US Policy, Noam Chomsky, contends:
“In such pronouncements, the term anti-American and its variants
(‘hating-America’ and the like) are regularly employed to defame critics of
state policy who may admire and respect the country, its culture, and its
achievements, indeed think it is the greatest place on earth. Nevertheless,
they ‘hate America’ and are ‘anti-American’ on the tacit assumption that the
society and its people are to be identified with state power”.[24]
‘Identification’ is as a tacit
obedient, but an obedient of a desired type. Through such action and rhetoric, The
State apparatus and institutions are upheld. This reproduces its very hold over
legitimate force and its restriction on liberty, jeopardising any potential
deviation from the ‘safe haven’ of what we know provides the desired ends of
peace from our mutual passions. Obedience thus becomes not only to surrender
some of one’s liberty to restrain the body politic from a return to the state
of nature, but to comply in reproducing these very same conditions.
This presents us with our third and final
impression of coercion – the
application of manipulative restriction
against citizens for (a) some common ends and (b) to limit divergence from this
established formula, be it through the imposition of physical violence or
otherwise.
I would like to stress therefore that,
ultimately, Coercion centres itself
on a plain of restriction. This begins with the implicit violence and
limitation of liberties at the conceptual origin of The State,
and by virtue of this, extending these restrictions to include non-physical
manipulation of citizens to these same ends, but also to limit any potential
divergence from this established modus
operandi. Through this final extension,
we are able to witness the source of the conflation between Coercion and Oppression. In order to elucidate this claim, we must now centre
our focus on conceptualising Oppression,
permitting the clear distinction between the two concepts to be made overt.
STATE OPPRESSION
Unlike the
explicit logic of restriction guiding coercion,
oppression however is directed by an
ulterior rationale. In the history of Modern Political Theory, oppression was
brought to the fore through the discourse concerning the relationship between
property rights and The State. Famously declaring that “Man is born free, and
he is everywhere in chains”, Jean-Jacques Rousseau touched on precisely this in
his early writings.[25] Arguably, Rousseau’s
grasp of oppression is still widely the basis of our own understanding. In
short, Rousseau thought of oppression as the enforced conditions of enslavement
and domination, where one person is forced somehow to do the work of two, if
not more. There is another half of the equation for Rousseau however, as with
oppression comes the willingness to be oppressed for some apparent reward. As
he argues:
“Citizens allow themselves to be
oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind ambition; and looking more
below than above them, domination becomes more dear to them than independence,
and they consent to wear chains in order to be able to give them in turn to
others…inequality spreads easily among ambitious and cowardly souls always
ready to run the risks of fortune and, almost indifferently, to dominate or
serve, according to whether it becomes favourable or unfavourable to them.”[26]
Inequality, as associated to the asymmetric
collection of wealth and property, therefore in Rousseau’s terms, leads
citizens to perform their role in consenting to oppression. By this strength,
in the dialogue between our desire for wealth and our performativity to these
ends, the body politic masochistically desires, consents to and resists
oppression. This formula, Rousseau goes on to state, becomes a concrete staple
of our civic association as “it derives its force and growth from the
development of our faculties and the progress of the human mind, and eventually
becomes stable and legitimate through the establishment of property and laws”.[27]
Rousseau’s
conceptualisation of oppression as the both active and passive enslavement of
citizens forms the foundation of how oppression tends to be understood in the
wider ether. Of course, in many ways, it was Rousseau’s grasp of oppression as
the relation between inequality and property which influenced the work of Karl
Marx, who extended this relationship to the overarching systemic role of
production in society. Although Marx did not create the notion of class, and
his own wider typology of socio-economic classes is dubious at best, in his own
word, he proved: “that the existence of class is only bound up with particular
historical phases
in the development of production”.[28]
It is
through this development, also known as the ‘Materialist conception of
History’, that the ‘ruling’ class of the epoch oppresses another with and
through the overarching mode of production defining the times.
Although a
problematic text to reference, widely and incompetently over-utilised as a
reductionist summary of Marx’s entire body of thought, I think ‘The Communist
Manifesto’ displays the Marxian understanding of oppression in succinct terms.
Here Marx and Engels argue:
“Hitherto, every form of society has
been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and
oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be
assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The
serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune,
just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of feudal absolutism, managed to
develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of
rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the
conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism
develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident,
that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and
to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law. It is
unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave
within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state,
that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer
live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer
compatible with society”.[29]
Thus,
Marx too conceptualises oppression as a form of enslavement, but rather in class
essentialist terms.[30] As the class of
labourers, and as such the creative element in society, the proletariat are
forced to sell their labour for a wage in order to reproduce the very
conditions of their own subsistence. The Capitalist mode of production is
defined by this relationship between those who labour to produces commodities
for exchange (The Proletariat), and those who own not only the means to create,
but also the outcome of production itself - purchasing the very labour out from
underneath the being of the labourer themselves (The Bourgeoisie). This is a
condition of enslavement, for Marx, precisely as the forces and relations of
production are upheld by the political, legal and cultural structures which sit
atop the mode of production. Therefore, his ‘Theory of the State’ is brought to
the fore with his allegory of ‘Base’ and ‘Superstructure’:
“In the social production of their
life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent
of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of
development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these
relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which
correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of
material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life process
in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being,
but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”[31]
By this framework, the role of The
State in the Capitalist mode of production is to reproduce the conditions of
proletarian enslavement to the relations and forces governing this very same
mode of production. ‘Enslavement’ is the term precisely because in this
condition, as Marx tells us, ‘men’ are ‘independent of their will’, and it is
The State which upholds this formula.
Even
grander than this, the Proletariat are oppressed precisely due to the fact that
the systemic apparatus force them to commodify their labour, and then as a
result, become ‘Alienated’ from it, in a handful of ways, and from the
capacities which define their being as human, at least on Marx’s terms. In this
moment, the very activity of labouring belongs by the Bourgeoisie through their
laws of exchange, paying a wage for labour in return. This mutates the
proletariat’s activity of labouring into an ‘unfree’ one. In his ‘Economic Manuscripts’, Marx writes:
“Consider further the above
sentence that the relationship of man to himself first becomes objective and
real to him through his relationship to other men. So if he relates to the
product of his labour, his objectified labour, as to an object that is alien,
hostile, powerful, and independent of him, this relationship implies that
another man is the alien, hostile, powerful, and independent master of this
object. If he relates to his own activity as to something unfree, it is a
relationship to an activity that is under the domination, oppression, and yoke
of another man.”[32]
This is the epitome of the modern
understanding underpinning oppression,
as an enslavement in which an individual or subject, in this case the
proletarian subject for Marx, is unable to escape the conditions they are forced
to inhabit and are upheld by The State through physical or non-physical force.
This is our first image of oppression – the
enslavement of individuals and the maintenance of the conditions of enslavement.
An
illustration of this would be the way in which any wage labourer is perpetually
forced by the hegemony of the socio-economic system to sell their labour for a
wage in order to subsist. In the same vein, such oppression includes the enslavement of a subject politically, upholding some
form of hegemonic control. This would include the subjugation of minorities as
excluded from the political sphere, without rights or suffrage. In this manner,
the violence exercised by The State against The Suffragettes, for example, was
not simple coercion, but violence to
keep Women in their established position within the perceived structure of
society – i.e. as lesser beings than men. This is beyond coercion, beyond
violence of mere restriction, but violence to subdue, and it precisely this
that makes such action oppression.
This
being said however, perhaps this first image of oppression, as enslavement, is
not encompassing enough to account for the myriad of forms oppression takes. In
her work on the concept, Ann E. Cudd provides an increasingly positivist and
detailed analytical account of ‘oppression’. Here she conceptualises it in a
four-fold manner, stressing:
“Oppression names an objective
social phenomenon which is characterised by:
1. The harm condition: individuals are harmed by institutional practices
(e.g. rules, laws, expectations, stereotypes, rituals, behavioural norms).
2. The group condition: Individuals suffer harm in (1) because of their
membership (or perceived membership) in a social group.
3. The privilege condition: there is another social group that benefits
from the institutional practice in (1).
4. The coercion condition: there is unjustified coercion or force that
brings about the harm.”[33]
Cudd, here, goes on to discuss each
condition in turn, forging a criteria by which to explain the phenomena of
oppression itself. The operation of this conceptualisation was to turn the
normative debate in an analytical and empiricist direction. The merits of this
account are that it goes farther than that of Marx or Rousseau in a positivist
manner; here, contending oppression is more than a mere forced enslavement of
condition, but is infact a number of conditions that come together and can be
analysed holistically, as a single whole. Accordingly, Cudd provided the
capacity to eradicate from our intellectual toolbox those theories which: “fail
the tests posed by the criteria or comes up short in comparison with other
social scientific explanations”.[34] This permits us to pin to
the phenomena in the public sphere all those state actions which meet this
criterion as oppression. So, perhaps through this positivist lens we have found
our final image of oppression.
Nevertheless
however, Cudd falls into the trap of conceptualising oppression by only what
can be sensed empirically, taking no account of the existential effects of the
phenomenon on the oppressed subject. As much as I hold a respect for the
ventures of Cudd, and indeed all strictly social-scientific analysis, here
Cudd’s analysis embodies a danger, one
which can be expressed as such:
“The danger is that these theories
are not only plausible, because they take their evidence from actually
discernable present trends, but that, because of their inner consistency, they
have a hypnotic effect; they put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing
else but our mental organ for perceiving, understanding, and dealing with
reality and factuality.”[35]
In this case, the ‘reality and
factuality’ of the matter, as Arendt puts it, is the non-physical harm imposed
on a subject when they are the target of state-oppression, overlooked by Cudd
as a non-discernable aspect of the phenomenon.
So,
the question becomes how not to commit the same oversight. How do we include
the strictly existential features of oppression into our first image?
Enslavement, and the perpetuation of this condition, implies primarily the
exclusion of the oppressed from the public sphere. ‘Enslavement’ is connected
to exclusion, as through exclusion from the public sphere, individuals are
unable to change the conditions in which they are forced to live. The State
oppresses to uphold the status-quo of domination – eliminating ‘undesirables’
from the political realm itself, be it through physical violence and
persecution, or non-physical violence and domination by legislation and social
rhetoric.
This
is the site of the conflation between coercion
and oppression. As we saw in the last
section, an increasingly forgotten aspect of coercion is the force exerted by The State in order to restrict
divergence from the established formula of things. Oppression equally restricts divergence, but is founded on a plane
of restricting some as opposed to all, and herein lays the difference
between the two. State Coercion is to restrict divergence from the statist
paradigm – State Oppression is to uphold the domination of a given peoples or
subject precisely because of their subjectivity. To uphold and reproduce the
status-quo is central to both concepts. State Coercion stems from the necessity
of The State to uphold and reproduce its legitimacy founded on the monopoly of
violence – exercising this violence in its own name. Be that as it may, State
Oppression stems not from the use of force or restriction to reproduce
legitimacy, but to keep in a disadvantaged position a certain group of peoples
and alongside this, the conditions of such disadvantage.
Nevertheless,
let us return to the existential effects of exclusion. To be oppressed is to be
part of the downtrodden, a member of the ‘Wretched of the Earth’ as Frantz
Fanon once stated.[36] To keep an identity
downtrodden is, in the final analysis, to restrict their very being. To be
oppressed is to be no more than the antonym of ‘the elect’. Irrespective of
whatever the logic is justifying oppression, to oppress is to restrict the
being of an individual, and in this, all that they could become. I think a brisk
stroll into the etymology of the term oppression
can reveal something of this.
As a
linguistic signifier, the word ‘oppression’
has a rich history. Before employment as part of the English language, ‘Opression’ rested within the French
linguistic toolkit as a term indicating the cruel or unjust use of force.
Essentially, this demystifies no more than it fogs, signifying what we already
know about the phenomenon. This requires us to go one-step further into the
linguistic past. The French term holds its origins, without surprise, in a
Latin phrase - ‘oppressionem’ (‘oppressio’ in the nominative). This is the
noun of action from the past-participle stem of ‘opprimere’ – the assimilated form of ‘ob-’ and ‘-premere’.
Individually, ‘ob-’ implies
‘against’, and ‘-premere’ ‘to press
down’. Thus, we can see that at the etymological foundation of oppression rests opprimere – signifying the forceful pressing down against something
or someone.
By
utilising this brief etymological endeavour, we can see that the archaeology of
the signifier reveals to us that to oppress is to press down - to subdue and
therefore keep stationary.[37] It is in this vein I
propose that the conceptualisation of oppression as a mere enslavement ignores
this very aspect of its phenomenon. To be oppressed is not just to be enslaved,
excluded and restricted by The State, but it is to have denied the potentiality
of some Being.
This
means that the very basis of subjectivation – the process of how an individual
formulates and becomes a subject – is not just restricted, but locked into
place.[38] Oppression denies the
capacity for the subject to transform, to appear differently in the eyes of the
political community and ones-self. In this instance, the subject is locked into
no more than what The State permits it to be. Here, a subject is deprived of potentiality,
and innately with this, the capacity to begin something new. It is due to this
‘pressing down’ that oppressed subjects are not granted the very human capacities
of a) appearing in public, due to their formal exclusion, but also b) engaging
with the potentiality to change how one’s very being is mediated by others.
This leads me to assert that at the centre of ‘oppression’ is not just simply ‘enslavement’, but enslavement via
what I call the quelling of motion. I
use the phrase ‘quelling of motion’, as by ‘pressing down’ one holds that which
is subdued as motionless, static and unable to undertake kinesis.
Simply
put, to oppress is to limit what a subject as
a Being can become – limiting their potential to no more than what they are
already understood to be. This is enslavement precisely as the oppressed are
kept in an existential cage, forcefully excluded from the capacity to engage
with the public sphere, and with this, their potential to become a recognised
subject on their own terms. Three hundred years ago, slaves were oppressed
because they were permitted no more of a subjective being by The State than of
any other commodified tool or object – and treated as such. Two hundred years
ago, women were oppressed because they were permitted no more of a subjective
being by The State than of any other piece of their husband or father’s
property – and treated as such. One hundred years ago, members of the LGBTQ+
community were oppressed because they were permitted no more of a subjective
being by The State than that of a pathological abomination – and treated as
such. These are all illustrations of how individuals can be oppressed by The State,
be it physically or not. All three exemplify oppression as enslavement via the
quelling of motion, as The State restricting not only the capacity of some to
act and appear in the political realm, but their capacity to ascertain a
subject beyond The State’s own rhetorical understanding of their existence.
Therefore, this is our
final image of oppression – the
enslavement of a subject and the maintenance of the conditions of enslavement
through the ‘quelling of motion’.
SOME FINAL THOUGHTS
The
violence that states employ against their own citizens, as we have seen, is no
new phenomenon in our collective history. States have coerced and States have
oppressed long before these phenomena befell discussion. We began this
discussion by establishing how State Coercion and State Oppression have become
conflated terms within this discourse; used as interchangeable signifiers to
denote the same phenomena of State violence against its own citizens. The
danger with such a conflation is that it confuses more than it clarifies,
limiting our capabilities to think
about the phenomenon and so to understand and engage with it.
Our
efforts in the previous two sections brought to the fore what distinguishes State
Coercion and State Oppression. After an attempt to discern the kernel of each
concept in turn, our final conceptualisations were found to be as follows:
Coercion is the
application of manipulative restriction against citizens for (a) some common
ends and (b) to limit divergence from this established formula, be it through
the imposition of physical violence or otherwise.
Oppression
is the enslavement of a subject and the maintenance of
the conditions of enslavement through the ‘quelling of motion’
In this, we
can see that coercion centres itself on a plateau of restriction in the name of
the statist paradigm, be it through physical or non-physical violence. Here,
citizens are restricted in order to reach some common ends. Essentially, these
common ends are to avert the failure of The State, and as such, the descent
into the anarchy described in the Hobbesian state of nature. In order to
prevent such a collapse, this restriction upholds ‘The State’ as an established
and effective means for achieving such an ends. State Coercion is therefore
dripping with the fear of what could be, in the worst possible scenario. It is
this fear guiding coercion as a means to upholding ‘The State’ as a legitimate
political and civil association, which we can see through Weber’s analysis has
been the case from the inception of this association itself.
The
underlying conceptual core of State Oppression, however, rests with enslavement
and the ‘quelling of motion’. Through some logic, violence becomes the instrument
to achieve some ends of exclusion, even eradicating entire sections of society
in the name of some cause. The apex of this came to be in the twentieth
century, when through the logic of ideology, states committed and endorsed the
most horrendous crimes for some greater ends, greater than that of state
survival or the prevention of a collapse into the state of nature. Through
oppression, individuals are excluded and reduced to an existential restriction,
unable to become anything more than an existence without a subject, where one
cannot define oneself on one’s own terms. In Nazi Germany for example, the
Jewish subject was reduced to a non-human object, as defined by the rhetoric of
The State and the ideology it purported, rending an entire section of society
as sub-human. This is oppression in its purest incarnation– to lock into place
the very being of an individual, suppressing their capacity to be anything more
than what official and social rhetoric associates with their subject. Both
Coercion and Oppression entail some form of restriction, and here is the cause
of conflation. Nevertheless, State Oppression restricts beyond that of a mere
limitation of liberty, but restricts on an existential plane - attacking the
individual at their very Being.
We
began this investigation with the intent to sharpen our conceptual
understanding of State Coercion and Oppression, awakening our grasp from its
blunted slumber. For too long we have tried to understand our paradoxical times
with conflated or outdated tools. Times and events move swiftly through the
currents of paradox. Now, with our declared freedom rest also are our chains. This
is but one of the paradoxes we now experience as citizens on a daily basis. The
grounds we used in the past to navigate these tricky slopes have become a
quagmire, and although this exploration is certainly no attempt to make the
quicksand traversable, it might have brought some part of it into focus. If we
lose the necessity of understanding to think, it will not be mere focus required,
but by that point, perhaps a faith that our feet will touch the bottom will be
our only hope. And I, for one, am not prepared to rest our collective condition
on hope alone. Therefore, in order to understand and judge the violence some
are forced to endure by their own political associations every moment they draw
breath, we must cry louder than before – ‘To
the whetstone!’.
[1]Freedom House (2019) Freedom in the World 2019, Washington DC:
Freedom House, p. 16. See also: Freedom House, ‘Freedom in the World
Countries’, freedomhouse.org,
https://freedomhouse.org/report/cou ntries-world-freedom-2019 (Accessed 9th
February 2019).
[2]Francis Fukuyama (1989) ‘The End of
History?’, The National Interest, 16
(1), pp. 3-18, p.3.
[3]Laura Trevelyan (15th
November 2011) ‘Occupy Wall Street: New York Police Clear Zuccotti Park’, BBC News, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-15732661
(Accessed 9th February 2019).
[4]Polybius (2010) The Histories, Oxford: OUP; Tacitus
(1973) The Annals of Imperial Rome,
London: Penguin Books. During the ‘Melain Dialogue’, Thucydides composes
arguably the first statement of the long history of political realism, namely:
“The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must” in:
Thucydides (1972) The History of the
Peloponnesian War, London: Penguin Books, p. 402.
[5] Hannah Arendt (December 11th
1968) ‘Lecture on ‘Power and Violence’,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =EMUae5HXgOQ (Accessed 12th February
2019).
[6] Anthony Richards (2015) Conceptualizing Terrorism, Oxford: OUP,
p. 16.
[7] Ann E. Cudd (2005) ‘How to Explain
Oppression: Criteria of Adequacy for Normative Explanatory Theories’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 35(1),
pp. 20-49, p. 26.
[8] Hannah Arendt (2003) ‘Thinking and
Moral Considerations’, in Jerome Kohn, ed., Responsibility
and Judgement, New York: Schoken Books, pp. 159-189.
[9]For Example: Andrew Kernohan (1998)
Liberalism, Equality, and Cultural
Oppression, Cambridge: CUP; Will G. Pansters (2012) Violence, Coercion and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The
Other Half of The Centaur, Stanford, CA: SUP; Karl de Schweinitz (1957) ‘Economic
Growth, Coercion and Freedom’, World
Politics, 9(2), pp. 166-192.
[10] Michael A. Weinstein (1972) ‘Coercion,
Space, and the Modes of Human Domination’, in J. Roland Pennock and John W.
Chapman, ed., Coercion, Piscataway,
NJ: Routledge, pp. 63-80, p. 72.
[11] “’Political Theory’ is a phrase
that in general requires no explanation. It is used here to denote speculation
about the state, which is its traditional meaning from Plato onwards”, taken
from: Martin Wight, “Why is there no International Theory?”, in Martin Wight
and Herbert Butterfield, (Ed.) (1968) Diplomatic
Investigations, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 17-35, p. 17.
[12] Max Weber (2004) “Politics as a
Vocation”, in David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, ed., The Vocation Lectures: Science as a Vocation - Politics as a Vocation,
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, pp. 32-94, p. 33.
[13] Thomas Hobbes (1968) Leviathan, London: Penguin Books, pp.
189, 186.
[14] Ibid, pp. 163, 190.
[15] For more information on this see:
Robert Nozick (1969) ‘Coercion’, in S. Morgenbesser etal, ed., Philosophy, Science and Method, New York:
St. Martins Press, pp. 440-72; Robert Nozick (1974) Anarchy, State and Utopia, Oxford : Basil Blackwell; Peter
Kropotkin (2002) The Conquest of Bread
and Other Writings, Cambridge: CUP.
[16] Charles Tilly (1985) ‘War Making
and State Making as Organized Crime’, in Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer,
and Theda Skocpol (Eds.), Bringing the
State Back In, Cambridge: CUP pp. 161-191.
[17] E.A. Goerner and Walter J Thompson
(1996) ‘Politics and Coercion’, Political
Theory, 24(4), pp. 620-626.
[18] Christian Bay (1965) The Structure of Freedom, Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, p. 93.
[19] Hannah Arendt (1970) On Violence, New York: Harcourt Books,
p. 28.
[20] Stephen Lukes (2005) Power: A Radical View, London: Red Globe
Press, p. 27.
[21] Hannah Arendt (1998) The Human Condition, Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press ; (1970) On
Violence, New York: Harcourt Books.
[22] Barbara Copinska (2016) ‘Free from
State Violence or Free to Comply? A Revised Typology of Coercion and Repression
in Liberal Democracies’, Democratic
Theory, 3(1), pp. 32-51, p. 40.
[23] For more information, through an
increasingly Marxist perspective, see: Louis Althusser (2008) ‘Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses’, in On
Ideology, London: Verso, pp. 1-60.
[24] Noam Chomsky (2004) Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest For
Global Dominance, New York: Penguin Books, p. 45.
[25]
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1968) The Social
Contract, London : Penguin Books, p. 49.
[26] Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1987) Basic Political Writings, Indianapolis,
IN: Hackett Publishing Company, p. 77.
[27] Ibid, p. 81.
[28] Karl Marx (2000) Selected Writings, David McClellan (Ed.),
Oxford: OUP, pp. 371-372.
[29] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
(2002) The Communist Manifesto,
London: Penguin Books, pp. 232-233.
[30] These terms include Marx’s curious
existential metaphysics of labour, whereby production and creativity are the
uttermost essential basis of being human; this adding to the increasingly
modern notion of Homo Faber by
viewing ‘man’ as a labouring animal before all else, as Animal Laborans. For more information see: Hannah Arendt (1998) The Human Condition, Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, pp. 79-96.
[31] Karl Marx (2000) Selected Writings, David McClellan (Ed.),
Oxford: OUP, p. 425.
[32] Ibid, p. 92.
[33] Ann E. Cudd (2005) ‘How to Explain
Oppression: Criteria of Adequacy for Normative Explanatory Theories’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences,
35(1), pp. 20-49, p. 23.
[34] Ibid, p. 48.
[35] Hannah Arendt (1970) On Violence, New York: Harcourt Books,
p. 7. As far as a critique of ‘Scientism’ in the political studies is
concerned, there are a number of works I could recommend, but the most
influential for myself has been: Hedley Bull (1966) ‘International Theory: A
Case for the Classical Approach’, World
Politics, 18(3), pp. 361-377.
[36] Frantz Fanon (2004) The Wretched of The Earth, New York:
Grove Press.
[37] Upon review of this piece, the
notion of oppression as one’s process of subjectivation being externally held
stationary and bound to such a condition drew my mind to Hobbes’s
conceptualisation of liberty as being the lack of external constraints to will
physical motion within one’s capabilities, and as such, Hobbes rallies against
the republican conceptualisation of liberty as an extension of regime type,
i.e., that democracy always produces liberty by virtue of itself, and monarchy
the lack of such a liberty. For more on this see Chapter 21 of Hobbes’s Leviathan,
or Quentin Skinner (2008) Hobbes and Republican Liberty, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
[38] For more information on
‘Subjectivation’, see: Michel Foucault (1985) The History of Sexuality:
Volume II – The Use of Pleasure, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 29-32;
Andreas Oberprantacher and Andrei Siclodi (Ed.) (2016) Subjectivation In
Political Theory and Contemporary Practices, London: Palgrave Macmillan.