Hired guns@column head = Hired guns
By Peter Boyle
There is a growing market out there for hired guns, helicopter gunships, fighter jets and tanks, and the "professionals" who will use these lethal instruments for a fee.
When it comes to protecting their luxury homes, exclusive playgrounds, banks, diamond and copper mines, or even a friendly dictator, the world's wealthy minority are increasingly turning to private bodies of armed people rather than relying on state forces.
The capitalists explain this growing "market" as a result of the "failure of the state", but what does this mean?
States are spending more money than ever on their armed forces (about US$800 billion a year) so it isn't that there is not enough deadly hardware or trained killers. The rich control the great bulk of this formidable coercive apparatus, so what is their problem?
Well, they are discovering that they can't keep squeezing the world's already miserable majority without fostering rising political unrest and "crimes against property". In the name of "freeing the markets", inequality has been dramatically increased — on a global scale and within every country — and even the biggest police forces can't keep up with the social consequences.
The states of the wealthy imperialist countries find it hard to legitimise some of the foreign military interventions they would like to make today (such as in Zaire and PNG). Many of their puppet regimes in the Third World suffer an even greater crisis of legitimacy, expressed as mass unrest, civil wars and mutinous troops.
Consequently, there is an increasing number of "dirty jobs" that the capitalists need done but find hard to present as a legitimate exercise of state power. Hence the growing market for private security agencies and armies.
The more mundane growth of private security services is another example. In NSW there are around 35,000 private security guards, twice the number of police, which has been growing as well.
It would be hard to justify instructing the majority of police to spend all their time guarding the property of the rich, but the rich can get away with hiring a private firm that employs people trained by the police or armed forces. Such hiring costs can also be claimed as a tax deduction — a convenient arrangement.
But these are desperate responses of the ruling class to the growing alienation and unrest characteristic of late capitalism. It may get away with a little bit of private coercion here and there, but it is also eroding the legitimacy of the state, the main instrument guaranteeing its rule.
The effectiveness of the state depends on more than its coercive apparatus. The strongest capitalist states devote a large part of their resources to legitimising themselves. Parliaments, token elections, the legal system and the provision of some social services all help capitalist states present themselves as instruments of the whole nation. This legitimises the state's monopoly on public coercion, including the power to imprison people, commit legalised murder and wage wars.
The capitalists' greater use of private armies and private police erodes this legal monopoly and the violence which guarantees their rule is further exposed.
[Peter Boyle is a national executive member of the Democratic Socialist Party.]