State talk, state silence: work and 'violence' in the UK

Abstract

Even in states of exception such as the contemporary 'war on terror', the process of hegemony-building shows clearly the existence of a complex dialectical relationship between consent and coercion. Thus, we would argue that to understand the violence of the modern state, we need first to reject any crude dichotomy between force and consent--for the articulation of state power always implies an intimate inter-relation in which both are inseparable. Thus, following Gramsci, Poulantzas, Hall et al., and others, a critical analysis of the state should move beyond narrowly focusing on the repressive apparatuses of state power, crucial though these are, to the ideological apparatuses of the state. This entails a series of analytical tasks, one of which is the extent to which the state talks, or remains silent on, apparently related social issues around violence. This is the focus of this essay. In their cultural history of the British state, Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer noted that '"the State" never stops talking'. In making this important point about 'state talk', Corrigan and Sayer recognised that the power of the state in capitalist societies extended beyond its material role in confronting internal problem populations and external enemies, to the cultural and symbolic position occupied, and the interventions made, by the different institutions in civil society. These insights provide a frame for the two issues around which this essay is organised. Each is concerned with violence, but violence of two quite different kinds. First, there is violence used against those who maintain state power, such as police and prison officers, and how this violence is socially and ideologically constructed as an affront to the state itself, and by extension, to a civilised social order. Second, there is the violence committed against workers in the routine processes of production--albeit denied the label of 'violence', and virtually legitimated by the state bodies which formally exist to prevent it.