At one level of abstraction, the state is indeed not inherently good or bad. At another, the structural level, it most certainly is, in the sense of upholding the good and/or mostly bad laws enacted by decidedly partisan, servants of the ‘national interest.’ This is arguably the single most consequential flaw in any representative democracy.
In other words, absent an institutionalised mechanism for allowing the grassroots participation of men and women in lawmaking, and not just law-taking, the people will never govern themselves in their own interests.
Put concretely, in any class divided society - be it slavery, feudalism or capitalism - where a minority lives off the labour of the majority, with the backing of the state, then the latter is inherently bad, and cannot be otherwise.
In short, the notion of public service only has meaning if people at grassroots level collectively decide among themselves what the public interest should be and act collectively to allocate money and resources to those designated to provide those services.
As an aside, I often wonder what contemporary Chile would look like had Allende had not disarmed factory workers. Oh well.
At one level of abstraction, the state is indeed not inherently good or bad. At another, the structural level, it most certainly is, in the sense of upholding the good and/or mostly bad laws enacted by decidedly partisan, servants of the ‘national interest.’ This is arguably the single most consequential flaw in any representative democracy.
In other words, absent an institutionalised mechanism for allowing the grassroots participation of men and women in lawmaking, and not just law-taking, the people will never govern themselves in their own interests.
Put concretely, in any class divided society - be it slavery, feudalism or capitalism - where a minority lives off the labour of the majority, with the backing of the state, then the latter is inherently bad, and cannot be otherwise.
In short, the notion of public service only has meaning if people at grassroots level collectively decide among themselves what the public interest should be and act collectively to allocate money and resources to those designated to provide those services.
As an aside, I often wonder what contemporary Chile would look like had Allende had not disarmed factory workers. Oh well.