There are only two political rivals in the world today: organized crime and the state. It is true that there are many seemingly valid state ideologies vying for attention, but they are mostly different versions of the same idea, none of which defend the state in the way it needs to be defended. These versions include advocacy for shrinking the state, austerity, theocracy, xenophobia and zionism, neoliberalism and libertarianism. Marxism also remains part of the conversation, but the Marxists are merely a convenient and irrelevant target for the conservative versions of the idea listed above. I say irrelevant because the Marxists have mistaken notions about the state and these notions render them useless in the fight against organized crime.
James Cockayne warns that a failure to understand how mafias work has led to the overlooking of a major force in global affairs. What we are seeing today are the effects of a purposeful strategy for controlling the planet’s resources, and this strategy is a direct challenge to the authority of states. It represents the imposition of an alternate form of governmentality—in other words, a mental framework or operating system. The only entity capable of resisting organized crime is an efficient state. (James Cockayne, ”Hidden Power: The Strategic Logic of Organized Crime″, Oxford University Press, 2016)
I think it’s obvious that something similar to what happened in Italy after the World War Two is happening in the United States today. Just like in Italy, the ruling class in the United States would rather prop up a criminal state than give any credence to the political left.
According to Cockayne’s book, the rise of organized crime was not inevitable. The state’s silence, along with the media’s silence, has enabled it to gain power. However, he doesn’t advocate direct confrontation, which most definitely would not work anyway. He argues instead that states cannot simply disappear in this globalized world—they must learn to compete in the market for government. A state must demonstrate that it is an effective, credible, rewarding system of government, and the people must understand this and choose to be governed by the state rather than the other options becoming available, from ISIS to the transnational gang model of the maras. Otherwise, other forms of governmentality will continue to grow (309).
Leave a Reply