Marx's Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State

Theoretical Considerations

Raju J Das

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781351167987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Marx's Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State examines the capitalist state in the abstract, and as it exists in advanced capitalism and peripheral capitalism, illustrating the ideas with evidence from the North and the South.

The volume unpacks the capitalist state's functions in relation to commodity relations, private property, and the crisis-ridden production of (surplus) value as a part of the capital circuit (M-C-M?). It also examines state's political and geographical forms. It argues that no matter how autonomous it is, the state cannot meet the pressing needs of the masses significantly and sustainably. This is not because of so-called capitalist constraints, but because the state is inherently capitalist. Each chapter begins with Capital volume 1. And each chapter ends with theoretical/practical implications of the ideas which taken together counter existing state theory's focus on state autonomy and reforms and point to the necessity for the masses to establish a new transitional democratic state. But the book goes 'beyond' Marx too, as it deploys the combined Marxism of 19th and 20th centuries.

Marx's Capital, Capitalism and Limits to the State will interest scholars researching state-society/economy relations. It is suitable for university students as well as established scholars in sociology, political science, heterodox economics, human geography, and international development.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781351168007-1

This is a book on state theory. It builds on Marx’s (1887) Capital volume 1.¹ It is partly a response to the fact that the full potential of that foundational text of Marx and of Marxism for the development of state theory has not been fully realized. But this book on the state goes ‘beyond’ the Marx of Capital and indeed Marx as such. The vantage point of the book, unlike that of much of the existing discussion on the state, is the entire classical Marxism that Marx (with Engels) initiated and that was developed by the revolutionary Marxists of the 20th century.

Much state theorizing has been excessively concerned with the so-called autonomy of the state. It also under-emphasizes the common attributes of the capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of the state, so it under-conceptualizes the class content of the (capitalist) state itself. It lacks an international orientation too: it is, more or less, focused on the state in (Western) advanced capitalist countries, thus ignoring the similarities and differences between the state in advanced capitalism and the state in the periphery (i.e. the less developed world). Besides, state theory has tended to have reformist implications. For all these reasons, and given the recent intellectual criticisms and political struggles against the neoliberal form of the state, there is a need for a fresh discussion on the state, with an alternative Marxist theoretical orientation.

1 Waning and waxing of intellectual interest in the state

The intellectual interest in the capitalist state has waned and waxed. It appears to have gone through several phases of rising and declining interest since the first two decades of the 20th century. The waning and waxing of the interest in the capitalist state have closely, if not entirely, followed those in Marxism. Following a gap since 1918 when Lenin’s The state and revolution was published that closely followed Engels’ (1884) Origin of the family, private property, and the state, and Marx’s (1871a) Civil war in France, the Marxist theoretical interest in the state began in the early 1960s and picked up towards the late 1960s and continued till the late 1970s.

Since the early 1980s, there has been a drastic decline in grand theorizing of the state. This decline is partly due to the influence of post-modernism which rejects ‘metanarratives’.² Certain interpretations of globalization and what is known as neoliberalism (‘de-regulation’ of businesses by the state)³ have also contributed to the decline in the interest in state theory:

Marxist state theory and, increasingly, the state as an analytical object have been the victims of an improper burial. They have been buried by a conservative shift inside and outside of the academy. They have been buried by an assumed decline of the state in the face of globalizing and localizing forces.

(Aronowitz and Bratsis, 2002: xi)

In more recent times, there are signs of a slowly rising theoretical interest in the state, as partly indicated by a symposium titled ‘Marxist state theory today’, published in the Marxist journal, Science & Society (2021). There are also many other recent interventions (Ellner, 2017; Lasslett, 2015; McNally, 2019; O’Kane, 2020). This new intellectual interest reflects a new, or a newish, conjuncture. As Alami (2021: 163) notes in an article in the Science & Society symposium on state theory, ‘a number of social phenomena … have conjointly rendered the role of the state more visible in the economy’. The phenomena include ‘a “return” to various forms of state-led development across the global South since the early 2000s’ as well as ‘extensive state intervention following the 2008 global financial crisis in the global North (including the massive bailouts of systemic financial institutions and quantitative easing)’. To these social phenomena, one could add the immensely increasing control over income and wealth in the hands of the capitalist class (especially, its multibillionaires section) as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, which has prompted massive, if geographically uneven and politically contested, state interventions. All these phenomena have indeed produced an opportunity to rethink the existing ideas about the state, including in its neoliberal form. In fact, some commentators (e.g. Elliott, 2021; Plender, 2008, Saad-Filho, 2020) are already debating the end of neoliberalism and beginning of progressive (i.e. welfare-oriented) state policies. The titles such as The return of the state have begun appearing (Allen et al., 2015).⁴ The theoretical interest in the state is likely to increase, with a rising interest in Marxism and growing radicalization among sections of the population, especially the younger men and women, in part prompted by the global economic crisis of 2008 compounded by the pandemic and worldwide mass immiserization (Jeffries, 2012; Niemuth, 2017). Vast sections of the population are critical of the big business and pro-corporate state policies and demanding anti-corporate actions from the state (Das, 2022a). According to a poll conducted in 28 countries, including the United States, France, China, and Russia, 56% agree that ‘capitalism as it exists today does more harm than good in the world’ (John, 2020).

There is, of course, something ironical about the alleged ‘eclipse’ and assumed ‘return’ of the state. It is true that ‘by the early 1990s, globalization theory was being juxtaposed [by some] against state theory, with the latter allegedly in rapid retreat’ (Barrow, 2021: 171). However, insofar as state policies have been ‘critical to stabilizing the [global] financial crisis’ (ibid.) and dealing with the ‘effects’ of globalization (to which the state policies had also contributed), it is ironically globalization itself that is at least partly responsible for a new interest in understanding the state.

2 Existing state theorizing

In any case, in the post-1960s state theory, a large number of books and articles have been written on the state (these are extensively and critically reviewed in Chapter 2). In this literature, the nature of state power has been addressed from multiple vantage points. The latter could be stated broadly as the following: capitalist class agency, state actors agency, working-class agency, the structure of capitalist economy, and the structure of the capitalist state.

The existing literature has advanced our understanding of the state in many ways. According to some, pursuing its own interests, the capitalist class uses the state as an instrument, with the state lacking autonomy; this idea correctly implies that the state is not as neutral as liberals think. According to others, separated from the means of production, workers do not have to be extra-economically forced to work for a wage. So the very structure of capitalist relations allows the state an autonomous space, so the state is not an instrument. Yet, given that the state is institutionally separate from the capitalist economy and that therefore it depends on taxes and loans from capitalists, the state must promote capitalist production and exchange without which its own material basis will be at risk. The state uses its structurally given relative autonomy to support capitalists whose interests are often mutually conflicting. With globalization of production and exchange, however, some argue, the autonomy of the state has been somewhat reduced. In another school of thought, what the state does reflects the balance of class struggle outside the state as well as inside the state within which opposed classes are present. There are still others according to whom state actors (high-level politicians and bureaucrats) have their own autonomous interests, but ultimately their relation with capitalists is like that between two partners who pursue their common interests as well as the interests of their own.

These ideas do reveal important aspects of the state. Some of these ideas are also, more or less, shared by Marx in Capital volume 1 (I will also often use Capital 1) or are consistent with Marx’s ideas about the state in that text. Yet these ideas in existing state theory taken together are problematic in many ways.

It is said that the state acts in the interests of capitalists because it is directly influenced by capitalists and/or by non-capitalist groups with capitalist ideology who occupy important positions within the state. But what is it about the state that allows capitalists to control the state as an instrument? And why does the same state not allow socialists, or workers interested in a cooperative society practising popular democracy, to control the state? It is often said that the capitalist state cannot do this or that because the capitalist class constrains state’s actions (for example, the state depends on taxes). To me, constraints on the state exist, but these constraints have a derivative existence. They do not define the essential nature of the state.

The state has to be seen as inherently having a class character. Just as humanity has taken a long period of time to get underneath the production of surplus value until Marx, a similar situation exists with respect to the class character of the state. How important it is to examine the class character of the state can be gazed from the following lines from Engels, whose contribution to state theory matches Marx’s contribution to theory of surplus value and who is Marx’s true intellectual heir in terms of state theory:

Just as the movement of the industrial market is, in the main … reflected in the money market and, of course, in inverted form, so the struggle between the classes … is reflected in the struggle [within the state] between government and opposition, but also in inverted form, no longer directly but indirectly, not as a class struggle but as a fight for political principles, and so distorted that it has taken us thousands of years to get behind it again.

(Engels in Marx and Engels, 1975: 399; italics added)

Existing theory does recognize the class-state relation. However, to the extent that the state is seen as an organ of class rule, it is often seen as maintaining a reconciliatory balance between the opposed classes. Such an approach under-conceptualizes the class character of the state – the state as a means of oppression of the exploited classes which are always in a relation of struggle with the exploiting classes. Such an approach also forgets that to be a Marxist proper requires more than recognizing the influence of class relations and class struggle on the state (and on other aspects of society). It therefore forgets that recognizing the existence of the class character of the state must include recognizing the imperative of the abolition of class relations and of the establishment of a transitional proletarian state as a necessary stage for the abolition of class relations. Consequently, in spite of its class vocabulary, much existing state theory, implicitly or otherwise, has an objective effect: it is the revisionist idea that democratic rights dilute the inherently class character of the state.⁵ There is an under-emphasis on the limits to not only the democratic character of the capitalist state (i.e. whether and how it is democratic) but also to the extent to which the state can provide economic concessions to the masses.

This problem of the under-conceptualization of the class character of the state exists in part because much of the empirical conte...