Enemies of the State posted by Richard Seymour

Review of Michael Haynes and Rumy Hasan, A Century of State Murder? Death and Policy in Twentieth Century Russia, Pluto Press, 2003; and Penny Green and Tony Ward, State Crimes: Governments, Violence, and Corruption, Pluto Press, 2003.

Why Won’t You Die, Already?

Death is the great leveller, we agree. A rich man may escape the stress and ordeals of a peasant’s life, but he may not escape his eventual termination. Haynes and Hasan would hasten to argue, however, that the timing and circumstances of a person’s death is closely framed by social structures – authoritarian or libertarian, egalitarian or exploitative. It is premature death that is unfair. They cite Richard Lewontin’s claim that if we want to eradicate TB, we ought to worry less about the tubercle bacillus and more about poverty and hygiene. The tubercle bacillus was a cause, but not the cause of widespread TB infections. Indeed, the contrast between pre-war, depressed Britain and post-war booming Britain is precisely one between widespread poverty and disease (rickets, TB etc) and radical improvements in both health and wealth for the masses. Policy, and economic structure, shapes the distribution of death in all societies – poor societies have high birth rates and high death rates, while richer societies tend to have declining birth rates and death rates, with an initial population explosion as death rates decline faster than birth rates.
Aside from social and economic causes of death, there can be ideologically induced famines, as in China and Russia this century, in which policies of forced collectivisation and diversion of vast resources to technological and military expansion caused millions of premature deaths. These can also include famines produced by deliberate neglect and blockade, such as the Bengal famine of 1943, in which a harvest failure was rendered deadly by the British decision to reduce sailing in the Indian Ocean to sustain the war campaign in North Africa. Three million Indians died for the maintenance of Empire. But premature deaths resulting from policy can often be less extreme in its immediate impact, yet more deadly and insidious over time. Amartya Sen compares the death rates in India and China after 1948, noting that because India was a capitalist society, it lacked certain crucial social provisions which the Chinese government was ideologically inclined to provide – notably healthcare for the peasantry. The Chinese catastrophe of the ‘Great Leap Forward’ was in the long run outmatched by the premature deaths caused by India’s failure to use its resources to serve its citizens, so that India racks up more skeletons each year than China did in its entire years of shame.
Haynes and Hasan are dealing with Russia, and the peculiar nature of deaths in a country cursed with so punishing a destiny as constant war, oppression, and rupture. Specifically, what was the connection between the autocratic regime established in 1928 after prolonged inner struggle since 1917, and the tragic deaths of millions through famine, war and disease? And what is the connection between the nominally more liberal regime established since 1992, and the sudden explosion in state executions and mortality rates in the mid-1990s? They note a general connection between authoritarianism and high premature mortality rates. The more power is devolved and decentralised, the more likely it is that welfare institutions will thrive to oversee the health and nutrition of the poor, and the less likely it is that working people will accede to working in unsafe environments. Penny Green and Tony Ward, in their study of state crime, go one further and point out that the more unequal a society is, the greater tendency toward authoritarianism. Discussing Latin American states, they note that those countries which had the means with which to meet some of the demands of the rising peasant insurgency, and less exploitative class relations between the peasantry and the capitalists/landowners, felt less inclined to resort to the use of death squads, or did so less often and with less brutality (Honduras). Those states that were ideologically committed to keeping the poor in their place, and also had no real means of meeting peasant demands that did not upset the social order tended to greater brutality (Guatemala). The terrorist symbols of such countries were the hacked, tortured bodies left in the streets after a visit from death squads.

From Russia, With Blood.

In Russia in the 20th Century, a radical attempt to create a society that was both egalitarian and libertarian resulted in an autocratic state, which exploited both peasants and workers more brutally than most capitalist democracies. Haynes and Hasan map the outlines of the vast changes in Russia with the use of forensic examination of demographic data in Russia over the 20th Century. It isn’t an easy task, especially since Stalin was given to increasing the population by six million or so at the bat of an eye. But the detailed picture of mortality, both ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ under the Tsar, the Bolsheviks, Stalinism, then the transitional post-Cold War period reflect a thesaurus of state crimes, not just the obvious ones of brutality and oppression, but also of policies selected and enforced in the knowledge of their certain dire outcomes.
Mortality under the Tsar had been viewed as intimately connected with the country’s backwardness, and the limited nature of capitalist development. The demographer S A Novoselskii noted that “the Russian death rate is generally typical for countries that are agricultural and backward in sanitary, cultural and economic relations”. The Tsar responded by encouraging the development of capital and urban centres. But, although the average income per had did in fact increase, death rates remained high as a result of poverty and the fact that towns had become “reservoirs of disease”. National and local epidemics were frequent, often stimulated by harvest failure. At the same time, there was a distinct class character to these deaths – the poor were more prone, not only to sickness, injury and malnutrition, but also to infanticide, murder and suicide. Accidents at work befell employees, and not the employers. Access to sanitation, clean water, and the absence of punitive labour lengthened the lives of the wealthy, while workers in the emerging capitalist centres were subjected to “truly penal labour” of up to 18 to 20 hours work per day. There is also the matter of infant mortality, which is typically higher in poorer societies with more children perishing in their most vulnerable years.
The other aspect of Tsarist society that contributed to high mortality rates was the priority given to military expenditure over all other forms of spending. In 1913, central government military spending accounted for 57% of the national budget, health and education only 7%. The lost war with Japan at the turn of the century had cost the Tsar economically and politically. The 1905 revolution was the fruit of that, and other factors – it was also a reaction to prolonged state brutality; to the violence of the Black Hundred gangs who, with the Tsar’s approval, murdered and terrorised his political foes, especially Jews; and to the way in which new capitalist inequalities were merging with old feudal ones, each sharpening and intensifying the other. That revolution, of course, met with immense violence as the Tsar’s troops sacked, burned and killed thousands. The order was “Don’t skimp on bullets, and make no arrests”.
World War One heightened all of the above factors as well as contributing its own battlefield mortality. Those most affected when supplies ran low were the poor. Those pushed to the front line to die were workers and peasants.
But then the controversy begins, for the revolution of October 1917 led to a qualitatively new kind of society, with aspirations toward abolishing exploitative and oppressive relations for good. Are the Bolsheviks to be regarded as murderous criminals or as honest revolutionaries working in extremely difficult conditions? Haynes and Hasan have no difficult in affirming the latter. The ‘crimes’ typically attributed to Lenin (specifically the famine of 1921-2, the brutality of the Red Army, and state institutions like the Cheka which would later be used as tools for Stalin’s terror) are more often than not the product of circumstances beyond Bolshevik control. The famine of 1921-2, for example, was the result of a cyclical harvest failure made worse by the blockade imposed by the allied countries – the authors note that mainstream historians are content to note the brutal nature of such a blockade applied to Germany during World War One, specifically the evil way in which it targeted civilians, but never mention the effects of the blockade on Russia. Food and medicine were desperately needed. There is a well-known correlation between harvest failures and the spread of disease, and the impact of the blockade was to prevent both the cause and the effect from being treated. Even such aid as they did manage to get (from the Save the Children Fund, the Quakers and so on) did not come close to meeting the desperate situation. Typhus cases shot through the roof, as did diphtheria, relapsing fever, dysentery, cholera and so on. Now, add to this the impact of the civil war. The civil war was the result both of the violence of the White Armies and the invasion of the Entente powers. There were also the Green peasant forces who perceived the Whites as a greater threat than the Bolsheviks, but nevertheless waged pitch battles with the Red Army where it felt it could. And finally, there was the Polish invasion of 1920. The authors acknowledge that the Red Army inflicted its own brutalities, but insist that these were checked and attempts were made to reign in excessive use of force. They also note that the opposing armies were often even more brutal. Most importantly, there is an implicit bias in blaming the violence of the civil war on those forces which disrupted the old order, rather than on those seeking to restore the old order – that is, there is a bias toward the capitalist status quo. There is also, they argue, a qualitative distinction between the use and practises of institutions like the Cheka under Lenin, and the amplification of draconian state police institutions under Stalin.
In this judgment, the authors don’t shun controversy. Less controversial is their description of the Stalinist terror state. They note that over the 1930s as a whole, birth rates and death rates appeared to fall slightly – but this had nothing to do with what had been promised or achieved by Stalin. Most crucially, one only reaches such averages by having ones feet in the fire and one’s head in the freezer. In 1933, the death rate (per thousand) soared from 29.5 in the previous year (comparatively high) to 71.6. By 1939, it was back down to 20.1. Infant mortality in 1933 had shot up from 182 (per thousand) to 317, and was back down to 168 by 1939. Life expectancy in 1933 dropped to 11.6 years – compared to 36.5 years in 1930 and 43.6 years in 1939. These sudden steep changes are largely accounted for by the enforced collectivisation policies of Stalin, which created and exacerbated the conditions for mass famine. But the background of this, the authors argue, is the attempt by the bureaucracy to accumulate capital more rapidly than Western powers (which they succeeded in for a while), and also the shift in priorities away from meeting the needs of ordinary workers toward military competition. Military expenditure rose from 2% of output in 1928 to 6% in 1937 and then 15% in 1940. Similarly, the share of output dedicated to consumption fell from 73% in 1928 to 64% in 1950, and even as low as 55% in the 1970s and 1980s.
The enforced collectivisation had effectively fast-forwarded the processes of primitive accumulation of capital, scattering peasants from the land and forcing them into the urban working centres while also allowing the state – standing in for capital – to seize control of grain production and break the power of the kulaks. Haynes and Hasan note that the famine was not a matter of intention, but rather of the complex interaction of socio-economic structures, agricultural factors, external pressures and ideologically inflected policy. There were in fact vast numbers of excess deaths attributable to intentional policy, perhaps up to 1 million murdered, but the effects of famine and policy produced 9 million excess deaths in the 1930s. The authors nevertheless note that such a description cannot absolve Stalin from blame, since the socialist argument against capitalism had always been that its priorities, and not the absence of available resources, prevented it from addressing the fundamental problems of poverty, malnutrition and disease. People starved, though they did not need to. Thus, the famines in Ireland of 1845-48 and in Bengal of 1943. The authors suggest that, far from redeeming Stalinism, these facts enjoin one to cast the net of critique much wider.
This critique of the underlying, chronic causes of acute crises is deployed alongside a forensic analysis of mortality, disease and welfare figures to investigate the era of glasnost, and then perestroika. Health spending, increased slightly in the 1960s, combined with a host of reforms in the countryside and elsewhere to increase life expectancy and reduce infant mortality. But health spending declined during the Seventies and Eighties as a percentage of output, and so did life expectancy. The wages of medical staff were significantly depressed. Pensions were miserly, even though Soviet workers could retire much earlier than most Western workers. Working conditions improved after Stalinism, but only barely. The facts about the stagnant society of Brehznev and Gorbachev are uncontroversial. It is when the matter of ‘transitional’ Russia, post-‘communist’ and post-Cold War, is discussed that the authors become disputatious in the best style.
They systematically debunk the myths attending the demise of Stalinism, while accepting this event as essentially a good thing. In particular, the detailed analysis of the mortality rates, disease and starvation patterns, and the use of state violence which they have employed in discussing the previous 90 years is now turned to a withering critique of neoliberal Russia. On 2nd January 1992, Boris Yeltsin’s ‘shock therapy’ began in earnest. The shock came in two ways – first, the price explosion (food suddenly cost four times what it used to), and second, the massive public expenditure cut-backs. Inflation did drop – from almost 250% in January 1992 to approximately 30% in December 1992. Progress indeed. By 1995, it was estimated that 80% of Russians had suffered a serious decline in their income. Income from work for families has dropped from being about half of all income at the start of the 1990s to just 39% in 2000.
Unsurprisingly, the mortality statistics reflect this harsh new reality. From a mortality rate of 11 per thousand in 1990, the death rate soared to 15 per thousand in 2000, peaking in 1994 at almost 16 per thousand. In fact, in this “unprecedented peace time mortality”, we find an alarming underlying truth about Russian society. Between 1990 and 1999, there were 3,353,000 excess deaths in the whole Russian territory. Male life expectancy fell from 63.5 years in 1991 to 57.6 years in 1994. Female life expectancy fell from 74.3 years in 1991 to 71.2 years in 1994.
The factors Haynes and Hasan attribute these alarming statistics to include not just the general decline in living standards. In fact, they argue that this in itself would not be sufficient to cause such a catastrophic rise in premature deaths. Specifically, they relate it to a surfeit of sickness and disease in a country that is infrastructurally weakened and spending less and less on healthcare programmes. Alcoholism also plays its part, owing itself both to the draconian Soviet legislation on booze and also to social depression as a result of the 1990s decline.
But aside from this, there is a wave of ‘abnormal’ deaths, as the Yeltsin/Putin years have coincided with a drastic increase in the use of state violence, whether through war on Chechnya, or through the death penalty. The conviction rate in Russian courts has doubled and, since Russia’s prison-industrial complex has not expanded in capacity like its rival in the US, the prisons are increasingly overcrowded, dirty and diseased.
While the use of the death penalty decreased substantially during 1992-4, it rose again in 1995-6, only to collapse again shortly after. Why? Because when Yeltsin was playing soft cop, he was appealing to the European liberals. When he was playing hard cop, he was appealing to a Russian people terrified by violent crime. The war in Chechnya meanwhile has taken 13,000 Russian soldiers, 17,000 Chechen fighters, and 160,000 civilians. That’s a total of 190,000 excess deaths for the sake of Russia’s continued possession of the province of Chechnya.
The authors of this shocking book conclude, rather less than shockingly, that “Russia is not in a good state”. But they argue that this is not merely the result of aggregate social factors or individual psychological defects. It owes itself, at least in part, to the social psychology of a people increasingly disenfranchised, isolated and atomised. Having toppled Stalinism, they have been left with the most forlorn, icy, windswept capitalism. From the stony edifices of Moscow to the Siberian Plains, one might say. But their reasons for writing this book are, the authors insist, optimistic. Like the Russian artist, they paint death in order to create life.

"Don’t Steal – The Government Does Not Like Competition!"

Penny Green and Tony Ward have composed a unique, elegant and perspicacious volume on the crimes of states, drawing rich and suggestive insights into the nature of corruption, political violence, police brutality and state terrorism. They suggest that, contrary to what theorists like Anthony Giddens claim, coercion and violence is central to the functioning of liberal democracies. Their analysis comes from a criminological perspective, examining the motives for states and statesmen to engage in ‘deviant’ behaviour that is detrimental to human rights and often to human lives.
Anyone wanting to know where the cops get off with their aloof condescension, pettiness, bigotry and violence will find a helpful summary of the main framing conditions of police conduct – among them, the fact that encounters with the public often involve one side "winning" and for the copper, it has to be the police; that there is an institutionally enabled cynicism toward those likely to come on the end of state coercion; that they tend toward authoritarian conservatism; that they reinforce an Us vs Them attitude to the public; that they are deeply cynical about both law and lawmakers; that decision-time often involves working with assumptions about the efficacy of threats, so that a normal person will take threats seriously and more willingly comply, whereas an emotionally distressed or mentally ill person is considered likely to be impervious to threats.
The case studies of Harry Stanley, Ibrahima Sey and Glen Howard reveal how deadly such assumptions can be. Sey, for example, was a mentally ill Gambian asylum seeker whose errant behaviour had alarmed his wife. The police had dealt with him calmly until they reached the police station, allowing his friend to come along for comfort. However, once they reached the station, control of a body within police territory became more important than avoiding violence. The friend was told he may not continue, and Ibrihima had to be dragged into the station resisting. Six or more officers set about Sey and subdued him. As he was brought to the ground and handcuffed, he appeared to cease resisting. An officer sprayed CS gas in his face, and he was trailed into the custody suite where four to six officers held him face down on the floor, pinning his head, legs and arms down. In short time, he appeared to go limp. After fifteen minutes, they realised he had stopped breathing. It is, of course, well known to the police that being restrained in a certain position for a prolonged time will cause asphyxiation. It seems pedantic to note that their behaviour also violated ACPO guidelines.
The authors also explore the extent and nature of state terrorism – not just in terms of warfare, but also through proxy armies and death squads. The use of these is much more widespread than we might imagine. For instance, it is well known that Latin American states under the supervision of the US often used death squads to terrorise the population and decimate the opposition. This is also true of many African and Carribean states. But what about Western democracies? Aside from US sponsorship of Contra terrorists in Nicaragua, the authors note that both Spanish and British governments have resorted to their use, respectively in the Basque region and in Northern Ireland. The British government appear to have had direct involvement in the activities of the UDA (also known as the UFF) and their targetting of Republicans, both paramilitary and civilian. The UDA was a legal organisation in Northern Ireland until 1992, when they were banned – a UDA spokesman claimed that this was because the British government could no longer control the organisation. It seemed that through the Force Research Unit (FRU), British intelligence had employed Brian Nelson to penetrate the UDA, ascend within it, and help direct some of its killings. The British government claims that this was on account of a desire to prevent the indiscriminate killing of Catholics and ensure that only really bad people got shot. Unfortunately, a prominent lawyer who defended both Protestants and Catholics named Pat Finucane was deemed at one point their most feared enemy, and was duly murdered. And there was a strategy behind attacks on ‘ordinary decent Catholics’ consistent with the aims of the UK government – namely to demonstrate to nationalists that the IRA could not protect them.
The Spanish government involvement in terror is rather more outlandish. Between 1983 and 1987, a group called the GAL killed twenty-seven people. The supposed targets were ETA militants, but nine of those killed were not members of ETA. A clan of mercenaries and former police officers, the GAL was funded and organised by government ministers and leading Socialist Party politicians. In one notorious episode, in 1983, they abducted a French citizen called Segundo Marey whom they mistakenly believed was an ETA militant. Government ministers directing the GAL ordered that Marey be kept in capitivity in order to put pressure on the French government to release four Spanish officers they had in prison. It was also suggested that Marey be killed. The scandal erupted in the centre of state power when two of the police officers involved in the abduction made a public confession. What as noteworthy, according to the authors, was the irrationality of the behaviour as much as its cynical strategic calculations. They quote anthropological studies as revealing "a state suffused with affect", carried away on its own fantasies of omnipotence - like the terrorist, they are unbound by petty laws etc.
Other state crimes include deliberate neglect (in which a natural disaster such as an earthquake in Turkey is aggravated by poor building work and inadequate foundational strucutre, particularly in poor areas), state-corporate crimes (in which the state collaborates in or facilitates the destructive actions of a particular company or conglomerate), corruption (for example, the vast octopus of kickbacks and bribes which sustains the political class in Colombia), and torture.
Torture is a paradoxical tool of state terror, since the effect is quite often to bring the victim close to death and yet the purpose is undermined if actual mortality results. Quite often, the significance of torture is not the information/confession it induces. Such information is usually rubbish, or useless. What the state wants, frequently, is simply to force the victim to acknowledge his or her complete submission and humiliation, to affirm that intense pain is world-destroying. The authors document a wealth of Western involvement in terror regimes, either in supporting such regimes politically or through supplying them with the tools of torture.
State-corporate crimes may involve the state employing private companies to do its dirty work for it. Outsourcing terror, one might say. An example would be the British government hiring Sandline International mercenaries to guard diamond mines in Sierra Leone while a civil war raged between the RUF and the government. Another would be the way in which the government of Nigeria allows companies to provide it with crucial information about the legality of land use, building on environmentally vulnerable areas etc, while also allowing oil companies like Shell to hire "supernumerary police" who then in fact become directly answerable to the police commissioners. One could also investigate the disappearing mangroves of Ecuador, the alliance between the UK government and its arms industry which causes it to sponsor murder in East Timor etc etc. The criminogenic factors contributing to each mode of state crime are carefully analysed at the level of the social, institutional and personal. The synthesis is a muscular one.
A fine combination of superb muckraking and acute criminological insight, State Crimes should be a manual for everyone interested in the dirty secrets of governance, and Lord Butler would do well to outshine Hutton and have himself a read of this excellent work - if only so that he may know what awaits him if he delivers the wrong verdict.