An Allegation

The most dangerous state is the revolutionary state. Its factions are dispersed, or united. It owes little to limiting tradition or custom. Its leaders cannot recognize the restraints which benefit its predecessors. The revolutionary state is total, and therefore unstable.

There are no revolutionary states which last, because revolutionary states are and can only be transitional. But, while they exist (in the extreme: the Directorate, the Puritan Protectorate, the Bolshevik state before Stalin put an end to revolution, the Khmer Rouge, etc) their abrupt violation of pre-existing norms tend to consume the societies over which they claim power (since they do not govern in the traditional sense) until new factions and a new face to the ruling class emerges from the fatal conflict which prefigures and characterizes all revolutionary states.

Revolution is a failure of the ruling factions to interface with their captive populations in a manner which ensures the continuity of that captivity. The revolutionary state, on the other hand, is the failure of the ruling class to maintain a hold on the governmental resource chain because the captive population no longer recognizes or perceives of the learned purpose of government as valid. The revolutionary state, it follows, is the expression of a stasis between factions of the ruling class which weakens the traditionally stable form of power, until such point that new elements (often with the illicit support of licit factions of existing power) can re-establish a functioning competitive equilibrium between factions of the ruling class.

The revolutionary state does not represent the success of the revolt of the governed so much as it signals a transition between a state of weakened or too-equal factions of the ruling class and a period of flux.

It is during this period of flux that the revolutionary state can break with the prior validity of old norms, or perceptions of those norms, until such time as a new expression of the stable form of power emerges from the contest between factions, and a new interface with the captured population can take hold.

So that while the American state and government which has been lead by successive Presidents (from Reagan through Obama) who continue to perform functions similar to their predecessors, and with the same outcomes, does not appear revolutionary, it is precisely so.

The old norms suggested a Republic limited by its own Constitution. And while that Republic was always a useful fiction, it no longer serves the purpose of formalizing the command of a population captured to maintain an economy run for mercantilists, land owners and industrialists. Having nearly spent itself out attempting to accommodate the fall out of the industrial and information transformations of society, during repeated periods of stasis (the Civil War), bankruptcy, depression and a period of meliorating reaction (the New Deal), and having surrendered the bulk of its fiat powers to its corporate successors (Reagan through Obama), it has now arrived at its own terminal condition.

The American state has long maintained a semblance of continuity, despite retrospectively obvious periods of reconstitution and rapid alteration; one which has been preserved by successive conquests of alien others in the guise of Indians, Mexicans, Asians, Germans, Arabs and the usefully abusable domestically contained foreign nation of American blacks. But now it is on the verge of the outward expression of an actual revolution.

That it has been a revolutionary state since Reagan may seem counter intuitive. I suggest that it only seems so because it has become rote to assume that revolution and the revolutionary state share a familial consanguinity.

This is simply not so.

Revolutionary states eventually succumb to the pressure of self-preservation. A state, to be a state, needs resources and a population, and must eventually assume the tasks of government, which are always conservative. Government functions as a check on resistance to extraction of labor and resources. Government is precisely counterrevolutionary. Revolutionary states, by comparison, harness the failure of government towards the recreation of a new, more stable reconstitution of power.

The American government failed part way through Vietnam. It failed to perform its primary task, the containment of the population within confines and strictures which prevent widespread outbreaks of resistance to the form of power, the ruling ideology and faith and the extraction of labor. This is not to suggest it collapsed, as has happened elsewhere. Only that it failed, and in doing so provided the opportunity for the factions of the ruling class to begin a contest for control of the apparatus of the state in order to remake it and strengthen it in the face of an increasingly ungovernable set of captive populations, especially those until that point isolated as domestic enemies of order.

With the onset of the first Reagan Administration, the American state became a revolutionary state, actively engaged with culture and society in order to transform them, to reshape social relations and the perception of membership in that society. And while not all of its governmental functions have degraded, the priorities of that state and its contiguous and nominal governors have been directed towards the reshaping of American society. The American state has warred and  spent its way towards collapse, in order to reshape a society suited to a new period of extractive stability.

As a revolutionary state, it has been dangerously successful - in a country which once proudly boasted not only Christian radical populism, but active and widespread anarchism, socialism and communism, and which saw the emergence of Black power and feminism.

So successful, one might argue, that a black Christian man and his feminist electoral opponent now provide the two most widely recognized faces of that nearly complete reconfiguration of the language, culture and tenor of society. They are not the faces of opposition to power. They are power.

And as the revolutionary state completes its course, and as new threats to stability emerge in the form of rising populations, oil depletion, climate change and food scarcity, the American continent will once again find itself ruled by a restored and more stable form of power and government. One constituted to police revolt and resistance, instead of useful populations. One better suited to crushing resistance to the inequities of extraction.

A state suited to rule, and not simply government.

(please see the Second Reagan Revolution series at American Leftist for an in depth proof of my mere allegation)