If You Are Reading This, You Are Probably An Accessory to Murder…

How responsible are we for the actions of state governments?

Murder is regarded as one of the most serious offences that a person could commit against another, the violation of the inviolable, the permanent removal of another’s right to self-govern. Today we accept that people, corporations and even states are all capable of being murderers. When others do wrong, we are swift to take account, to call for justice, and to be enraged by the conditions which enabled such perpetrations. My contention with this general outlook is its propensity to ignore one’s own position in a wider causal chain that perpetuates systems of child poverty, rape and abuse, institutionalised racism and gender-based violence. The reality of this tendency, however, is a tough pill to swallow.

So the question to ask would be, “how connected are you to these events?”. To answer this, I turn to three different scenarios. The first scenario involves you shooting someone for no discernible reason. The second concerns you failing to prevent someone from pushing somebody else into oncoming traffic, when you have both the time and ability to do so. Lastly, let us consider the scenario of the British state failing to remove flammable cladding from a tower block, or failing to provide adequate mental health resources for people in need, or allowing disproportionate numbers of the young and black to die in custody.

The first two scenarios listed generally give cause for people to immediately concede direct responsibility and, therefore, the fullness of guilt regarding their actions. However, when it comes to the actions of the state, the opposite is true. After all, which standard subject of Her Majesty’s Government would claim responsibility for the actions of that same state? Now, whilst it would be easy to write a standard polemic on the collective behaviours of the state, it is that pre-modifying adjective of the “‘collective”’ that forms the thematic direction of this article.

Philip Abrams in 1988 defined the state as a “public reification”, acquiring an “overt symbolic identity progressively divorced from practice as an illusory account of practice”. In other words, the state takes on the appearance of an actuality that is separate from social processes and human action. It is exactly this culturally permanent fixture that allows the status quo to perpetuate itself. After all, if we are causally removed from the actions of the state, then how can we affect its processes and actions? How are we responsible?

The state is both subjective and real; intersubjective. Even if we discount the importance of a single vote; voters, collective actors, voting processes, ads and lobbyists all converge on a singular event. Which is, fundamentally, to affect a desired outcome. Each collective group is, to some extent, reducible to individuals. The state is intersubjective, a collective imagination, intersecting with the real invisible actions of state workers and officials who all take part in individual and collective engagement with state processes. This two-fold process makes the state a dualistic phenomenon.

In other words, if we vote for the party that destroys the environment more than another, are we not in some way responsible for the destruction of the environment? If we do not inform ourselves about particular issues, educate ourselves, listen and approach the perspective with both scepticism and humanity, do we not continue to perpetuate the status quo? If, despite our personal circumstances, we do not vote, is our inaction not complicit with wider structures of power and oppression? If we do not raise our voice in protests - however it looks; a black square on the ‘gram, a fist in the streets, an open letter on the lap of a student- can we really be a citizen in any broad sense? Can we shirk our responsibility for the actions of the body politic? The vote for women was not won in silence, the Race Relations Act of 1976 and the Slave Trade Act of 1807 both dissolve in Trotsky’s dustbin without mass participation.

Rugged individualism and atomistic self-interested outlooks compounded on by neoliberal economics, only take us so far. When speculative property markets crash, we blame banks, bosses, and bungling idiots in suits. Not to take away from that sentiment at all, but at some point, we must look inward. If ritual acts, which both form the basis for orthodox “state-making” and reproduce the state as it exists, then why do we never begin with us.

After all, it is not hard to admit that people operate in interconnected causal chains. When Cain asks God in the biblical canon if he is his brother’s keeper, the answer is undeniably “yes”. How does the common citizen escape blame for the actions of their representatives? If we elect a person with racist views, and they implement policies that exacerbate racial difference in socio-economic, political and educational attainment, who is more to blame, the MP or us?

I have seen my immigrant mother - not a native or a native speaker - working hours long into the day on her own, managing others within bureaucracy, working on the weekend, covering the shifts of others, having to go above and beyond. And she votes on every election without fail; she embodies a principle; a principle of refusing to exist within a system where she cannot exercise her vote. So, when the state kills abroad, we allow it in action and inaction, speech and deed, because - like it or not - the state is not autonomous nor only abstract. It is tied to us all by visible threads which bind capital, attention, platform and support. A cracked reflection of society. What it does, we allow; what it does not, we accept; what it might do at some point in that causal chain, is up to us.

Causal chains connect us all through history, time and space spanning back centuries and millennia towards converging points, up even to the singular moment which gave rise to the universe. When we discuss blame however, whether because of socialisation, political climate or personal inclinations, we shy away from it when it places us in close proximity to negative events that transpire.

Words by Yisrael Joojo L. Arthur

Illustrations by Andrew Craig