Nature's Evil

Optimists took the new correspondence between the interests of the people and the interests of the state as a universal law of the new era; in fact, it was a temporary blip which did not survive beyond the middle of the twentieth century. Simon Kuznets, the American economist of Belarusian origin, believed that, with economic growth, income inequality first increases and then decreases. 8 In 1971, he received the Nobel Prize for Economics, and ‘the Kuznets curve’ – an arc showing the relation between the growth of national economics and the inequality of citizen’s incomes – has graced many textbooks. But all of us – global citizens and particles of Gaia – are still waiting for the downward turn of this curve. Refuting Keynes’s belief that inequality leads to fixed capital investment, inequality is greater but the investment in infrastructure is less in the early twenty-first century than it was in the second half of the twentieth century. Every year, national elites consume ever larger shares of material resources, energy and air. Globally, inequality is growing even faster than warming, and contributes to it. Soviet socialism is a thing of the past, but so is American Fordism. The post-Cold War elites have stopped investing in the illusion of their usefulness; the age of cynical reason has begun. Tired of creating myths, the most powerful people on the planet have rejected reality.

In a labour-intensive economy there are limits to inequality; in a resource-dependent economy, monopolies grow without limit, and so does inequality. A state which is a monopoly producer of raw material, or is part of a cartel of such producers, has no reason to support justice, competition and the rule of law. Such a state does not depend on taxes and thus does not depend on the population. On the contrary, the population depends on the state. Its bureaucracy redistributes wealth, reserving a generous helping for itself. Political commentators have tried out different names for this type of state: the rentier state, the neopatrimonial state, the Mafia state, the kleptocratic state, the super-extractive state … In this competition to find a fitting name for disaster, my choice is ‘the parasitic state’. The original Greek meaning of the word ‘parasite’, today familiar from its use in medicine, was a ‘hanger-on’; it is time to return this useful word to the social sciences. * The parasitic state is a political community which maintains the attributes of a state but fails to fulfil its functions. In my view, parasitism is the extreme version of mercantilism. The parasitic state retains many of the traits of the mercantile state, and in particular its focus on the growth of gold reserves thanks to the export of raw materials and the restraint on mass consumption. But unlike mercantile empires, which in their best moments realised the functions of the state within their metropolitan lands (but of course not in the colonies), the parasitic state fails to meet these functions even for its own population. Public goods are unavailable or a fiction, social capital deteriorates, people and money flee the country. Instead of the old imperial ‘progress’ we see the triumph of archaic beliefs, demodernisation and decay.

Depending on the chosen resource, the parasitic state forms under specific conditions. First, such a state relies on a primary commodity, which liberates it from dependence on labour and people. Second, this commodity must be topical, not diffused, thus providing this state with the opportunity for a monopoly price formation, alone or with a cartel of its peers. Third, the commodity must be addictive, thus promising an unlimited growth in demand. In such a state, the population is superfluous, as Hannah Arendt put it in her study of colonial and totalitarian societies. 9 Such a society cannot say to its government, ‘no taxation without representation’. Once the key enterprises require relatively little labour, the workers cannot go on strike. If the wealth of the nation doesn’t depend on the labour and knowledge of the people, health services and education become irrelevant for the national economy. Instead of being a source of national wealth, the people become recipients of state charity. In this parasitic biopolitics the population wastes away or fails to thrive, not because of a policy of deliberate extermination but due to endemic neglect. The more the state relies on natural resources, the less it invests in human capital; the lower the level of human capital, the more such a state depends on its resource extraction. The circle is vicious.

Progress and the katechon