Marxist Approaches to the State

MARXIST STATE THEORY TODAY 177 ization and the Transnational Capitalist Class.” Science & Society, 64:1 (Spring), 11–54. Shaw, Martin. 2000. Theory of the Global State: Globality as Unfinished Revolution. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Cambridge University Press. Steger, Manfred B., and Amentahru Wahlrab. 2017. What Is Global Studies? Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge. Strange, Susan. 1996. The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press. United Nations. 2020. “Growth in United Nations Membership, 1945–Present.” https://www.un.org/en/sections/member-states/growth-united-nations-membership-1945-present/index.html Wriston, Walter. 1992. Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming the World. New York: Scribner’s. Science & Society, Vol. 85, No. 2, April 2021, 177–184 On the State as Political Form of Society WERNER BONEFELD Marxist Approaches to the State The many variations in Marxist state theory notwithstanding, they revolve around three distinct and contradictory approaches: Leninism, social democracy, and political form analysis. Leninism sees the state as an instrument of class oppression. It expounds a point made by Marx and Engels (1996, 35) in the Communist Manifesto, according to which the state is “merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” Leninism views the state as the executive committee of the ruling class and argues that the conduct of government reflects the interests of the dominant capitalist faction. At its emergence, Leninist state theory was opposed by social democracy. Social democracy conceives of the state as a fundamentally independent and neutral area for struggle over the implementation of transformative social reforms. The perennial question about the social-democratic conception is whether the economy has autonomy vis-à-vis the national state or conversely whether the national state has autonomy vis-à-vis the economy, characterizing its retreat or its resurgence as a power vis-à-vis the economy. Crudely put, in the democratic socialist argument “the power of money and capital retreat when the state advances” (Haug, 2005, 102), which creates the condition for 178 SCIENCE & SOCIETY government to act in the interests of workers, or in today’s flat enunciation of Hardt and Negri’s term “the multitude,” in the interest of the many. In this perspective the conduct of government and the dynamic of economy express the balance in the power of the social forces that act through the national state. The political form approach developed in the context of the New Left of 1968, particularly during the 1970s in the former West Germany and the UK. It developed as a critique of the state fetishism of both social democracy and Leninism.1 As Simon Clarke (1991, 4) explains, “the growth of the welfare state . . . undermined the crude identification of the state with the interests of monopoly capitalism.” At the same time, “the limited impact of the welfare state on problems of poverty . . . undermined the rosy social democratic view of the state.” The form approach rejected the state monopoly capitalism thesis for underestimating the independence of the state and it rejected the state theory of social democracy for underestimating the limits of that independence. It argued that the state is not an instrument of class rule and it argued further that the state does not “possess,” as Marx (1970, 28) had already argued in his Critique of the Gotha Programme, “its own intellectual and libertarian bases.” The form approach conceives of the capitalist state as the political form of definite social relations. This conception could also call upon Marx. For example, in the German Ideology Marx conceives of the state as the “form in which, the individuals of which society consists have subsequently given themselves a collective expression” (Marx and Engels, 1975, 80). Marx’s critique of political economy argues similarly. He writes in Capital that the state is the “concentrated and organized force of society” (Marx, 1990, 995). In the Grundrisse he refers to it as the political form of society “viewed in relationship to itself” (Marx, 1973, 108). The logic of his argument is that society doubles itself up into society and state; that is to say, he sees the state as “society’s [independent] power” (Marx, 1987, 439). Therefore, what appears in the distinction between state and economy is in fact a false separation. The form approach treats the separation of economy and state as distinct spheres, as socially constituted. It belongs to the conceptuality of the capitalist social relations. Its focus on capitalist social relations as the constituent foundation of the social forms is supported by Marx’s argument that historical materialism is “to develop from the actual, given relations of life the forms in which these have been apotheosized” (1990, 494). Just like the commodity form of capitalist wealth is a form of definite social relations, “the forms of law, politics, the State and the nation are forms of these same 1 The main contributions to the West German debate appeared in Holloway and Picciotto (1978). For the UK debate, see the contributions assembled in Clarke, 1991. MARXIST STATE THEORY TODAY 179 relations, too” (Neupert-Doppler, 2018, 817). Political form analysis therefore does not chart the “course of history” to determine the genealogy of the elements of the modern state and the modern state-system from antiquity. Such an approach historicizes the contemporary social forms and conceives of them akin to the “abstract materialism of natural science” (Marx, 1990, 494, 4n). The form approach does not historicize the state as an ontological essence that manifests itself in different modes of production as a state in, say, feudalism, capitalism, and socialism. Rather, its aim is to “present the forms [of the capitalist social relations] in the context in which they stand “logically . . . under conditions of a particular historically concrete form of society” (Blanke, Jürgens, and Kastendiek, 1978, 118–119). Political form analysis expounds the conceptuality of the state as the concentrated power of capitalist society. Its conceptuality is socially constituted. Political form analysis asks about the social logic that holds sway in capitalist social relations and that manifests itself in the separation of economy and state as distinct spheres. State and Society As the collective expression of bourgeois society, the state is neither a property of a class nor a neutral or independent power. Rather, like the commodity form, it is a form of historically definite social relations. While the commodity form is the economic form of capitalist society, the state is its political form. In its economic form capitalist society manifests itself as a depoliticized exchange society in which formally equal subjects of law and order are at liberty to pursue their rational interests by making contracts with each other as property owners, be that as owners of labor power or as owners of the means of production. In its political form capitalist society manifests itself as a concentrated power of social order and the rule of law, of order and law. The state concentrates the political as its means and by doing so successfully the state depoliticizes the social relations, guaranteeing the freedom of exchange in the form of a freedom of contract between equals before the law. Regardless of their inequality in property, the traders in labor power appear as equal legal subjects of contract. They are at liberty to dispose of their private property in compliance with the rule of law and in accordance with the rules of the market game. The rule of law forbids the dispossessed sellers of labor power and the owners of the means of production equally from stealing bread.2 The class character of the capitalist state is entailed in its form as the independent power of order and law in capitalist society. It lays down and enforces the rules of the game and by treating the social individuals as abstract 2 On dispossessed labor as the premise of capitalist social relations, see Bonefeld, 2011. 180 SCIENCE & SOCIETY citizens endowed with equal rights, it reproduces the inequality in property between “moneybags” (Marx) and the doubly free laborer. Exploitation assumes the form of formal legal equality. For Marx, legal equality is fundamentally bourgeois in character. In its content the right of equality is a right of inequality. As he put it with regard to the equality of individuals before money, “the power which each individual exercises over the activity of others or over social wealth exists in him as the owner of exchange value, of money. The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket” (Marx, 1973, 157). Moreover, since for the seller of labor power access to the means of subsistence is contingent upon her ability to achieve a labor contract, she belongs to the capitalist before she trades her labor power for a wage, and before the capitalist consumes her labor power for profit during the contracted hours of work, which is his acquired right. Nevertheless, although the worker is compelled to trade her labor power to dodge the freedom to starve, she remains a free subject, responsible only for herself. If conditions are such that her labor is not required, she becomes not only redundant. She also is at liberty to bear the burden of making ends meet out of her own resources. What is the price of a kidney? There is a fate far worse than being an exploited worker, and that is to be an un-exploitable worker. The life of the working class hangs by the success of turning its labor into profit. Yesterday’s profitable appropriation of some other person’s labor buys another man today: the buyer for the sake of making a profit, the seller in order to live. The producers of surplus value, dispossessed sellers of labor power, are free to struggle to make ends meet, which is in fact what the class struggle is all about. Struggle to make ends meet and laboring for profit are innate to the concept of the worker. Their struggle belongs to the conceptuality of capitalist wealth — that is, money that yields more money through the valorizing of living labor. In this conceptuality, the satisfaction of needs is a mere sideshow. What counts is the extraction of surplus value to make value valorize, to make money out of money (M . . . P . . . M′). There is the purchase of labor power, and then there is its consumption that produces a total value that is greater than the value of labor power. On the one hand, the social relationship between capital and labor vanishes in its economic appearance as an exchange of one quantity of money for another. This exchange relationship appears in its political form as a relationship of contract between equal legal subjects that are at liberty to pursue their own interests in an orderly manner by means of an equivalent exchange, in which “each pays heed to himself only, and no one worries about the rest” (Marx, 1990, 280). The equivalent exchange relations between the owners of commodities, including the proprietors of labor power, entail the state as the independent power of the rights of property, the security of social order, MARXIST STATE THEORY TODAY 181 the rule of law, the inviolability of money as the standard of exchange, and the morality of self-responsible entrepreneurship. For the laborer the latter entails the recognition of unemployment as an opportunity for employment. On the other hand, the social relations between capital and labor develop in the form of a constant struggle over wages to achieve sustained access to the means of subsistence and over the conditions of work, with the capitalist insisting on his acquired right to consume the labor power of its seller for profit, and the laborer insisting on the simple fact that she did not sell herself but only her labor power for the express purpose of making a living. Between equal rights, as Marx argues in Capital when analyzing the struggle over the length of the working day, force decides, and that is the force of state that decides not only on the rules of the game between the contracting parties but also on the conditions of work by outlawing, say, child labor, by legislating on the length of the working day, or by setting down in law minimum wage floors. The class struggle is a struggle for access to the means of subsistence, for improved conditions of trade in labor power, and protections from the werewolf hunger of capital for surplus value. Class struggle is the means of civilizing society’s treatment of its workers. This struggle invariably takes on a political form because it is the state that sets down the rules of the game and it does so as the organized means of order and law, adjudication and reform, legislation and enforcement of the rules decided upon. Historically, social democracy stands for the commitment to achieve improved conditions of labor. For the political form approach its commitment presents an objective illusion. The illusion says that the profitable accumulation of money that yields more money does not really count; what counts is the eradication of poverty. It suggests that the life of the class tied to work does not hang on the success of turning the worker’s labor into profit as the fundamental condition of achieving wage-based access to the means of life; what counts is the redistribution of income to labor. It rejects as absurd that useful things that cannot be turned into profits are burned; what counts is use-value production. It opposes capital as money-making, M . . . M′. Instead it considers money as a means of purchasing commodities (C . . . M . . . C) and demands that money be put into the pockets of workers to strengthen their purchasing power, connecting them more firmly to the means of subsistence. The exchange of labor power (C) for money (M) that is then exchanged for means of subsistence (C), is, however, a function of M . . . P . . . M′, that is, the extraction of profit from living labor. The “welfare state illusion” (Müller and Neusüß, 1971) posits what really matters. Nobody should go hungry ever again! Yet, poverty is not a coincidence of capitalist wealth. It is rather the premise of its concept (Bonefeld, 2014). In distinction to social democracy, the national state “cannot stand above capital, since capital is global in character” (Clarke, 1991, 54). Capitalist social 182 SCIENCE & SOCIETY relations are world-market relations (Bonefeld, 2000) and the conceptuality of the national state is therefore a world market conceptuality. Conceived in this manner, Marx’s conception of the state as the “concentrated force of bourgeois society” (Marx, 1973, 108) contains more than at first appears. In each national jurisdiction, the employment and welfare of the labor force depends on the profitability of each labor force in competition with all other labor forces on a world-market scale. The requirements of competitiveness, profitability, sound money, enhanced labor productivity, etc. belong to a system of wealth that sustains the employment and welfare of workers on the condition that their labor yields a profit, which is the condition for achieving a measure of social integration. Profitable employers purchase labor power. Unprofitable employers do not. The profitable extraction of surplus value is the condition of sustained employment and therewith sustained wage-based access to the means of life. The fate of a whole class of surplus value producers depends on the profitability of their labor at a world market level. In short, the political state is invariably a “planner” for the global competitiveness of “its” national labor force. Conclusion There is no doubt that the state is a field for social struggle and reform, and the more this struggle civilizes the conduct of government and achieves benefits for the dispossessed producers of surplus value the better. However, the state is not an instance outside capital, which Marx (1990, ch. 4) conceives of as a process of value as more value, of money that yields living off-springs on an expanding scale. Rather, the conceptuality of both state and capital is founded on the existence of a class of dispossessed surplus value producers, which is the one precondition for the existence of the capitalist social relation (Marx, 1990, ch. 23). The social-democratic demand for the eradication of poverty is therefore illusionary, however much its effort might civilize society’s treatment of its workers. Invariably for a politics for the many to succeed in one way or another it will have to facilitate the profitability of its national labor force in competition with all other national labor forces. Thereby a socialist politics in the interest of labor “becomes a continuation and confirmation of the economy, and the state becomes a concentrated form of economic compulsion. . . . Rather than being a potential means of emancipation from this compulsion, the conceptuality of the political system leads the class [tied to work] . . . to identify with the representatives of domination” (Agnoli, 2004, 124). I have argued that the commodity form of wealth entails the necessity of the state as the juridical form of violence, of order and law, of Right and rightfulness, of morality and profitability. Should things go to the wire, as invariably they do in antagonistic society, a power is required to contain the MARXIST STATE THEORY TODAY 183 turmoil, curb the passions of unrest, depoliticize the social relations if need be by use of force, and preserve the rule of law by suspending it in order to do what is necessary to overcome the disorder and re-establish for the rule of law the social order upon which it rests (Bonefeld, 2006). The form-analytical approach is a critique of the state. In the words of Holloway (2002, 92), “to critique the state means in the first place to attack the apparent autonomy of the state, to understand the state not as a thing in itself, but as a social form, a form of social relations.” Its political outlook is geared towards that sort of radical change, whose passing Max Horkheimer (1985, 99) bemoaned in 1942 and whose actuality Oskar Negt (1976, 462) sought to reclaim in the 1970s: “If there was anything in the twentieth century akin to a concrete utopia, that was the utopia of the councils.” I have argued that the political state is a class state without being the direct instrument of a class. It is not a neutral power. It is the political form of definite social relations and the conceptuality of these relations holds sway in the conceptuality of the state. In the meantime, the state illusion of social democracy, from Sanders via Warren to Melenchon, persists as the seemingly only viable alternative to the misery of our time, and rightly so. Department of Politics University of York Derwent College York YO10 5DD United Kingdom wb3@york.ac.uk REFERENCES Agnoli, Johannes. 2004. Die Transformation der Demokratie. Hamburg, Germany: Konkret. Blanke, Bernhard, Ulrich Jürgens, and Hans Kastendiek. 1978. “Form and Function of the Bourgeois State.” Pp. 108–147 in Holloway and Picciotto, eds., State and Capital. London: Arnold. Bonefeld, Werner. 2000. “On the Spectre of Globalisation.” Pp. 31–68 in Bonefeld and Psychopedis, eds., The Politics of Change. London: Palgrave. ———. 2006. “Democracy and Dictatorship.” Critique, 34(3), 237–252. ———. 2011. “Primitive Accumulation and Capitalist Accumulation: Notes on Social Constitution and Expropriation.” Science & Society, 75:3, 379–39. ———. 2014. Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy. New York: Bloomsbury. Clarke, Simon, ed. 1991. The State Debate. London: Palgrave. Haug, Wolfgang. 2005. Vorlesungen zur Einführung ins Kapital. Hamburg, Germany: Argument. Holloway, John. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto. 184 SCIENCE & SOCIETY Holloway, John, and Sol Picciotto, eds. 1978. State and Capital. London: Arnold. Horkheimer, Max. 1985. “Authoritarian State.” Pp. 95–117 in Aarato and Gebhard, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. London: Continuum. Marx, Karl. 1970. “Critique of the Gotha Programme.” In MESW, Vol. 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers. ———. 1973. Grundrisse. London: Penguin. ———. 1987. Ergänzungen und Veränderungen. MEGA. II.6. Berlin: Dietz. ———. 1990. Capital. Vol. I. London: Penguin. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1996. The Communist Manifesto. London: Pluto. ———. 1975. The German Ideology. In MECW. Vol. 5. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Müller, Wolfgang, and Christel Neusüß. 1971. “Die Sozialstaatsillusion und der Widerspruch von Lohnarbeit und Kapital.” PROKLA, Sonderheft 1, 7–70. Negt, Oskar. 1976. Keine Demokratie ohne Sozialismus, kein Sozialismus ohne Demokratie. Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp. Neupert-Doppler, Alexander. 2018. “Society and Political Form.” Pp. 816–833 in Best et.al., eds., The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. New York: Sage. Science & Society, Vol. 85, No. 2, April 2021, 184–191 Capitalism, Depoliticization, and Climate Politics ROB HUNTER* Introduction Catastrophic climate change and ecological degradation raise the stakes for the critique of the capitalist state. State capacities are often foregrounded by those seeking to understand how to get out of our current predicament: “Can the climate movement grow by several orders of magnitude, gather progressive forces around it and develop some viable strategy for projecting its aims through the state — all within a relevant time frame in this rapidly warming world?” (Malm, 2016b, 139). Many proposals for “democratic decarbonization” focus on the institutions of liberal constitutional states as “the means we have” — while acknowledging those institutions’ limitations and contradictions (Battistoni and Britton-Purdy, 2020, 60). Contemplating possible planetary futures in light of ecological catastrophe necessarily involves considerations on the disposition and composition of international * I am grateful to Jacob Blumenfeld, Kirstin Munro, Tony Smith, four anonymous reviewers, and the Legal Form editorial collective for their feedback.