Some Notes on the Theory of the Capitalist State

Werner Bonefeld 113 Some Notes on the Theory of the Capitalist State A review article on The State Debate edited by Simon Clarke, Macmillan, 1991 ● The State Debate, edited by Simon Clarke,1 is the first publication in the Capital & Class /Macmillan Series and republishes important contributions to the state debate. Most of the papers collected by Clarke have been at the centre of the CSE debate on the state during the 1970s. The collection includes papers by Holloway, Picciotto, and Clarke. Although these papers are not representative of the CSE debate taken as a whole, they do represent a distinct theoretical approach to the state which developed within the context of the CSE. The distinctiveness of the approach can be summarised in terms of the primacy accorded to class struggle, the emphasis on the ‘internal relation’ between structure and struggle, and the understanding of the relationship between the economic and the political as standing to each other in a relation of difference-inunity. The other side of the debate is represented by papers by Barker, Hirsch and Jessop. These papers comprise an attempt to theorise the state as a particular structure which is reproduced by social conflict, a social conflict which takes place within the framework of the objective laws of capitalist development. In reviewing The State Debate, Werner Bonefeld specifically concentrates on Clarke’s ‘class struggle approach’ to the state and attempts to develop this distinctive and rich understanding of the form of the state. 114 Capital & Class ● 49 Clarke’s partisan introduction makes clear the theoretical and political importance of the papers, draws out the different political implications associated with different approaches and shows the contemporary relevance of the state debate. Without Clarke’s lucid introduction the character of the collection could easily have been mistaken for an exercise of merely antiquarian concern. The State Debate must be regarded as one of the key books on state theory, beyond which to regress would be a theoretical tragedy. The development of the state over the last decade has brought out the superficiality and naivity of many earlier analyses of the capitalist state. The present collection provides a splendid opportunity for reviving critical debate on the form of the state. Such a debate will have to be a collective exercise. What I shall do is to supply some general suggestions which I believe are fundamental for understanding the capitalist state. I shall critically assess Clarke’s original contribution of 1983. This is justified because the contributions by Jessop and Hirsch have been critically assessed elsewhere2 and because Clarke’s critique in his introduction of other approaches, including the class-based approach by Holloway and Picciotto, is comprehensive and persuasive. Further, the difference between a structural and functionalist approach to the state and the approach centred on class struggle is clearly brought out in the republication of Clarke’s original contribution of 1983. The context of this paper was the New Right’s attack on the ‘Keynesian’ state. Did the New Right represent a ‘functional’ response to the structural crisis in the ‘fordist regime of accumulation’, as Hirsch and Jessop argue in the republication of their original articles of 1983, or, as implied by Clarke, did the rise of the New Right result from a political defeat of the working class? I believe that Clarke’s approach shows the way forward. His analysis attempts to integrate the ‘abstract’ level of the state debate of the 1970s with the historical development of the state in the 1980s 3 in a conceptually rich, but paradoxical, way. If the rise of the New Right was, as argued by Clarke, a result of the political defeat of the working class, how can one explain, in the face of a defeated working class, the failure of so-called Thatcherism? In what follows I shall first focus on the problems inherent in the class struggle approach to the state. Thereafter I shall focus on Clarke’s approach in more detail. The State Debate 115 Within the context of the CSE debate on the state, the emphasis on class struggle developed in response to the German state derivation debate. This debate was seen as downplaying ‘class struggle’ and as permitting a structuralist and functionalist conceptualisation of the state. The emphasis on class struggle was developed theoretically and on the basis of empirical analysis. The German debate was criticised for its focus on the objective laws of capitalist development permitting the exclusion of the class struggle from the analysis of the form of the state. Against the German debate, the ‘class struggle’ approach emphasised that the class struggle has to be seen as primary. However, the protagonists of the class struggle approach never resolved the fundamental conceptual problem inherent in their approach to the state. If the problem of the German debate was its downplaying of the class struggle, does the emphasis on the class struggle overcome the problem inherent in the German debate? In other words, is the emphasis on class struggle sufficient for establishing the internal relation between structure and struggle, an internal relation which was so much sought after by those advocating the notion of the primacy of class struggle? The conceptualisation of an internal relation between struggle and structure is not just a question of how much emphasis is accorded to the primacy of class struggle. The focus on class struggle can lead very easily to a conception of the working class as external to capital. Within the CSE debate on the state, the notion of the primacy of class struggle emphasised the state as a constant object of class struggle. Is it not the case that the very idea of the state as a mere object of class struggle tends to reinforce the theoretical separation of structure and struggle? Is it not possible to argue that the difference between the German debate and the British debate focused on the primacy which was attached to either laws of motion or class struggle? It seems to me that the distinctive CSE approach to the state did not overcome the dualist conception of the relation between structure and struggle. This externality as between structure and struggle obtains in the conceptualisation of the ‘state’ as an object of class struggle and not as a mode of existence of labour in capitalism. The danger inherent in an approach centred on the primacy of class struggle is that class antagonism is understood as a relation between two opposing armies whose internal relationship remains unexplored. I shall 116 Capital & Class ● 49 now critically assess Clarke’s understanding of the state. I shall do so with the view to discussing the state as a mode of existence of labour in capitalism. According to Clarke, the state is not a logical necessity of capital but an historical necessity emerging from the class struggle (see page 188). ‘If there were no class struggle, …there would be no state’ (page 190). The development of the state is, however, not purely contingent. The development ‘is governed by historical laws that have to be discovered on the basis of Marx’s analysis of the historical laws governing the development of the capitalist mode of production’ (page 189). Clarke thus conceptualises the state as a historical necessity emerging from class struggle within the framework of historical laws. The concept of class struggle ‘makes it possible to make the transition from the level of abstraction of the concepts of Capital to their historical application to the real world’ (page 190). The class struggle is thus seen as a means of mediating between the abstract analysis of capitalist reproduction and the concept of the state (ibid.). The contradictory foundation of capital is construed in terms of an abstract logic of capital on the one hand, and, on the other, the need of capital to integrate the working class into its logic (see page 197). The mediating role accorded to the class struggle entails that the constitutive power of labour has no role at the abstract level of capital. Labour’s role stands external to capital; capital has merely to attempt to integrate labour into its own project. This integration is seen in terms of class struggle mediating the abstract with the concrete. As a result, unity between structure and struggle is realised not on the fundamental level of the formation of abstract concepts but on the contingent level of historical development. The externality between structure and struggle is reinforced by the idea ‘that the state is not, in the strictest sense, necessary to capitalist social reproduction’ (page 188). Clarke argues that ‘none of the concepts developed in Capital presuppose the concept of the state’ (ibid.). Does that mean that the concepts of the critique of political economy are merely economic concepts? According to Clarke, Marx offers, in Capital ‘an analysis of the self-reproduction of the capital relation, within which the social relations of capitalist reproduction are regulated, albeit in a contradictory and crisis-ridden fashion, by the operation of the market’ (ibid.). As a consequence, The State Debate 117 Clarke does not understand the basic contradiction of the capitalist mode of production as the constitutive power of labour existing against itself in the reified form of capital. Rather, the basic contradiction of capital is understood to be capital itself. As Clarke puts it, the ‘starting point for the analysis of class struggle has to be Marx’s analysis of the contradictions inherent in the reproduction of the capitalist mode of production, on the basis of which the class struggle develops’ (page 190). It seems to me that this understanding of the primacy of class struggle is questionable. Is it possible to derive the class struggle from the logically presupposed contradictions of capital, contradictions which are seen as internal to capital? If capital is in contradiction merely with itself, how is it possible to integrate ‘labour’ into the analysis? If such a difficulty does obtain, how is it possible to establish the internal relation between structure and struggle? Is the class struggle merely an effect of capital being in contradiction with itself? It seems to me that Clarke rearranges the internal relation between structure and struggle on the basis of a causal relation between capital, as the constitution of the contradiction, and the class struggle, as the development of the contradiction. If one were to accept the idea of the state as merely an object of class struggle, why should capital have opted to supplement its rule through state power? According to Clarke, there is ‘no reason why capital should rely only on its material power. Thus, in seeking to overcome the barriers to the expanded reproduction of capital, capitalists use every weapon at their disposal, and one such weapon, of course, is the power of the state’ (pages 192/3). The state developed through the class struggle that accompanied the revolutionising of feudal society. Within bourgeois society the state is thus understood by Clarke, not as a functional agency but as a ‘complementary form through which capital attempts to pursue the class struggle in a vain attempt to suspend its contradictory character’ (page 193). Clarke argues that the subordination of the state to the reproduction of capital ‘is not simply given by the logic of capital. The state is also a moment of the class struggle and the forms and limits of the state are themselves an object of that struggle’ (page 195). He thus sees the form of the state to be constituted by the contradictory logic of capital, a contradictory logic which merely develops through 118 Capital & Class ● 49 class struggle. This understanding seems to reformulate Hirsch’s conception of social development, a conception which is based on the ‘disarticulation’ 4 of structure from struggle. The disarticulation is expressed in Hirsch’s notion of ‘objective’ laws but also class struggle. Clarke tends to integrate structure and struggle on the basis of a dualism between a determinist conception of ‘capital’ and a voluntarist conception of class struggle. While the constitution of capitalist power is seen in terms of a contradiction internal to capital, the development of this contradiction is seen as one of class struggle. According to Clarke, the state exists because of the class struggle, and the class struggle exists because of the internal contradictions of capital. This understanding of cause (internal contradictions of capital) and effect (class struggle) and result (the state), is not sufficient to conceptualise the internal relation between structure and struggle. Clarke’s understanding of the primacy of the class struggle is based on a distinction between structure and struggle—each of which is supposed to render its contrasting term coherent. The state is seen as escaping determinism because it is the constant object of class struggle and class struggle is seen as escaping voluntarism because it is qualified by capital being in contradiction with itself. Is it not possible to suggest that Clarke’s attempt to conceptualise the internal relation between structure and struggle is sustained through a tautological movement of thought? Critically assessing the notion of the primacy of class struggle does not imply its rejection simpliciter. Capital is class struggle. However, capitalist society is not a formless thing. The understanding of class antagonism as the essential social relation implies that the starting point is the social constitution and the historical movement of labour. Such an understanding entails that the so-called laws of capitalist development cannot be conceived of as laws internal to capital and hence as external to labour but, rather, as a movement of contradiction constitutive of, and constituted by, the mode of existence of labour in capitalism. The contradictory character of capitalist social relations are not constituted on the basis of ‘capital’, but in and through capital’s dependence upon labour. The conceptualisation of labour as the constitutive power of social existence is of fundamental importance for understanding the self-contradictory mode of existence of the form of the state. The State Debate 119 Unlike the theoretical suppression of class struggle in the approaches put forward by Hirsch and, especially, Jessop, Clarke’s emphasis on class struggle takes as its starting point the Marxian notion that all social relations are essentially practical. In that emphasis lies an important difference from structure-centred approaches. The difficulties inherent in Clarke’s approach is not that he sees class struggle as being primary but that this notion is not developed to its radical conclusion. Clarke understands the ‘state’ implicitly as a onesided abstraction (i.e. the state as a means employed by capital of imposing its rule over the working class). This notion is conceptually bound up with the notion of capital being in contradiction with itself. Clarke sees the contradiction of capital as being constituted by the tendency to the global overaccumulation of capital, as the development of social reproduction confronts the limits of the capitalist form as production for prof it. This conceptualisation of the contradictions of capital tends to neglect the constituting power of labour. It does so inasmuch as the constitution of this contradiction, i.e. the exploitation of labour, is displaced to one between the development of the productive forces and the limits of the market. This displacement is real inasmuch as it constitutes a mode of existence of labour in capitalism: the integration of the abstract category of labour with the value form. However, this displacement is real only in and through the constituting power of labour in and against capital: the imposition of work (exploitation) through the commodity form. Surplus value production concerns the ‘state’ in and through the mode of existence of exploitation as a social relationship of formal freedom and equality. The displacement of the contradictory unity of surplus value production (in its mode of existence as formal freedom and equality) to the state specifies the state as a moment of the social relations of production that preserves the conditions of capitals’ existence: living labour. Capital lives by turning the productive power of labour against itself. The fundamental contradiction of capital is its dependence on labour as the substance of value, and hence surplus value. The working through of the antagonistic tendency of the abstract category of labour compels capital towards the elimination of necessary labour at the same time as capital exists only in and through labour: the imposition of necessary labour is the precondition for exploitation. The 120 Capital & Class ● 49 preservation of living labour, both in terms of the existence of the working class and the normalisation of the aspiration of the working class within the limits of the capitalist form of social reproduction, is abstracted from capital as individual capital and conforms to the state’s constitution as a mode of existence of the social relation of capital and labour. The contradictory mode of existence of the state is not constituted by the contradictions internal to capital, as suggested by Clarke, but, rather, by the above reported contradictory constitution of the dependence of capital upon labour. The state is not just an object of class struggle but, more importantly, a mode of existence of labour in capitalism. The state is a moment of the imposition of exploitation through the commodity form. In sum, Clarke’s understanding of the state as an object of class struggle needs to be deepened into an understanding of the state as a contradictory form of the presence of the abstract category of labour in and against capital. In contradistinction to Clarke, the notion of the primacy of class struggle cannot be conceptualised merely in terms of the development of the contradictory constitution of ‘capital’. The contradictory constitution of capital needs to be conceptualised in terms of the constitutive power of labour. The contradictory existence of the state needs to be seen as being constituted by the mode of existence of labour in capitalism, the development of this contradiction needs to be seen as one of class struggle . Standing back from the book, the selection of papers might make it difficult for those unfamiliar with the debate on the state to follow the argument. Although Clarke’s justification of the selection of articles is persuasive, the direct critical interrelation between the various contributions is not immediately clear. In defence of the selection, Clarke’s comprehensive introduction sets the collection within the context of the wider debate on the state. The cohesion of the book is not achieved by the relationship between the selected contributions but by Clarke’s introduction. This circumstance makes the introduction the most important part of the book. Simon Clarke must be congratulated for providing a very impressive, comprehensive introductory survey. The State Debate 121 1. The State Debate. Edited by Simon Clarke. £14.95 (pbk.) pp.270. ISBN 0 3354 8590. Macmillan, London 1991. 2. See the collection of articles edited by Bonefeld/Holloway, PostFordism and Social Form, Macmillan, London 1991. 3. See also Clarke’s Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State, Edward Elgar, Aldershot 1988. 4. See Bonefeld: ‘Reformulation of State Theory’, Capital & Class 33, 1987, reprinted in Bonefeld/Holloway (eds.) cit. ob. ______________________________ Notes