Governance After Allocation: Interpretive Compression and the Persistence of Relational Regulation

The thesis that the state withers away addresses the class-domination form of political authority and leaves open what governance a complex society continues to require once the distribution question has been answered. This paper takes up that remainder. It sets out a functional typology of governance, distinguishing the allocative, coordinative, interpretive and generative functions, and argues that these accumulate as a society grows more complex. It then gives an epistemic account of authority. Where the cost of verifying a claim exceeds what any individual can bear, the question of whom to believe becomes an allocation of epistemic attention, and what an established authority supplies is a reduction of the verification cost borne across a community, an operation named here interpretive compression. Institutions and commons are accordingly complementary: commons expand the space of interpretations under consideration and institutions compress it, and generation halts at either limit. The account carries an evident hazard, since an explanation of authority by verification cost stands one step from a warrant for whichever authority happens to compress, and the paper answers it with a criterion: a compression remains contestable while the path of reopening it stays available to those subject to it, and it becomes appropriation once that path closes. The disappearance thesis is then restated in these terms. What the thesis reaches is allocative domination; relational regulation is left standing, since finite rationality, verification cost and interpretive conflict persist under any distribution of resources. A further condition is entered, concerning the position from which the bindingness of a norm is underwritten, which the disappearance of a state leaves standing. A concluding section argues that this persistence claim should be entered as an observation with specified mechanisms, and declines to state it as a conservation principle.