the State as Capital

The State as Capital Colin Barker 

From International Socialism, Socialism , 2:1 2:1,, July 1978, pp. 16–42. Copied with thank !rom the RED "e#ite.. REDS S – Die Rot Roten en "e#ite $arked up #y %inde &'Calla(han !or the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism OnLine (ETOL). (ETOL).

I. Introduction In recent years, there has been a welcome revival in the Marxist critique of political economy. A good deal of this revival has been concerned with the rediscovery of Marx’s concepts, concepts, and much less with their use for comprehending the contemporary capitalist world, If there has been a field where development has been most slight, however, it has been the critique of the capitalist state and its place within the reproduction of capitalism as a whole. Partly, this has reflected the very form that the revival of Marxist economics! has ta"en# what Marx did  write  write has been sub$ected to close %and often useful& scrutiny, wit what he left unfinished has been little developed. %In one area this is an unfair assessment. 'he debate over the place of domestic labour! in capitalist society# cf. our   bibliography.&  bibliography.& Marx intended to continue bin ma$or wor" with an account of the state and of the world mar"et, though to my "nowledge nothing has been preserved even by way of this pro$ected continuation. ()*+ 'he problem I want to try and discuss here is that of the place of the capitalist state in the capitalist system. uch a pro$ect is clearly too large for me to cover this adequately, and all I can hope hope to do is to indi indica cate te some some of the the prob proble lems ms whic which h seem seem to requ requir iree deve develo lopm pmen ent. t.

II. The general tradition 'he starting point for any adequate theory of the state must be the general discussions of the state in the writings of Marx and -ngels. At the ris" of considerable oversimplification, what they said is reducible to a small number of general propositions# ).

'he 'he state state is a prod produc uctt of clas classs societ society y, of a cond condit itio ion n in which in which society has become entangled in irreconcilable contradictions. If any "ind of orderly life is to continue in a society rent with internal divisions, the members of that society must lose their power to control the communal affairs of their society to specialised agencies and persons 'he state is thus not an everlasting and inevitable product of human social relations/ rather, it is a product of particular forms of society, whose manner of formation divides their  members against each other.

0.

'he 'he very existen existence ce of the state, state, in this this general general sense, sense, is therefo therefore re an indicati indication on of  alienated social relations. 1ertain forms of human social relations, organised around antagonistic divisions, ma"e impossible for all members of society to run their own society communally.

2.

'he existenc existencee of the state state involves involves a particula particularr form of the divisio division n of labour, labour, through through which some members of society specialise in directing the rest of ociety. 'he state is thus separated from the rest of society.

3.

'he means means of coerci coercion on are no longer longer the the direct direct property property of the the whole whole of society society,, but are are specialised into the hands of the members of the state. 'hus the state is a ... public ... public power whi power which ch no longer longer direct directly ly coinci coincides des with with the  population organising itself as an armed force. 'his special pub lic  power is necessary because a selfacting selfacting armed organisation organisation of the  population has become impossible since the split into classes ... 'his public power exists in every state/ it consists not merely of  armed men, but also of material ad$uncts prisons, and institutions of coercion of all "inds, of which gentile society "new nothing.

4.

'he 'he state state apparat apparatus, us, the product product of 1lass divisi divisions ons in societ society y, anything anything but neutral neutral  between classes. It is a crucial element in class rule.

5.

'he 'he fullest fullest develop developmen mentt of the state, state, whethe whetherr in terms terms of the relativ relativee growth growth in its its  personnel, the relative separation of its organisation and principles from those of class society, or by any other measure occurs with the development of capitalism the most completely alienated form of class society.

6.

'he destruc destruction tion of capital capitalism ism and the constr constructio uction n of communism communism require requiress the smashing smashing up of the existing state apparatus, its replacement by the armed power of the wor"ing class, and the beginning of the process of the withering away of the state altogether. A fully developed communist society, its production organised according to the famous  principle 7rom each according to his ability, to each according to his need8! will have no need of a state state organisa organisation. tion. It will be a selfgove selfgovernin rning g community community,, for whose whose members public and private interests will coincide.

'he state is an apparatus of violence, first and foremost, which enforces onto society a communal interest! or national interest! which is not the direct product of that society’s members and which maintains the basis of the class divisions. At this high level of generality, these core propositions about the state 9 and thus about the need to overthrow the state and destroy it as a condition of the realisation of human emancipation through communism 9 form part of the A:1 of Marxism both as a theory of human history and as a theory of human emancipation.

III. Some difficulties and unsatisfactory answers ;here problems begin to arise is when we move from this high level of generality to much more specific discussion of the precise relation between state and society within capitalism. It is this area,

above all, which Marx himself left ver y undeveloped, and which subsequent Marxist discussion has, until quite recently, not developed very much further. ;hat we have inherited from Marx are, above all, some brilliant historical accounts of particular crises in the development of the capitalist state, notably in ) =r, which is the same thing, why is not the mechanism of state constraint created as the private mechanism of the dominant class> ;hy is it dissociated from the dominant classta"ing the form of an impersonal mechanism of   public authority isolated from society> (6*+

'o this question, several "inds of answers have been given, which we can quic"ly outline, not in opposition to each other, but rather as if they were all additions to a rounded account. 7irst, the fact that capital can exist only as many capitals in competition with each other means that the reproduction of the whole society is a problem. In a society constituted as a mar"et, in which  production is carried out in isolated units related to each other antagonistically through exchange, some institution outside the production units must enforce order on them, guarantee the rights which each must recognise if social production as a whole is to continue. 'he maintenance of  contractual relations requires the development of law, and of an institution of coercion to enforce contracts and rights. Put another way, since the interests of each isolated individual in commodity  production include no conception of a general interest of society, the state is required to enforce a common interest on all participants. %'he state, in this perspective, is required as 'homas Bobbes’ Leiathan was required, to save humanity from the consequences of its own nature red in tooth and claw!8& 'he fierce competition between capitals means that capitalist society cannot ensure its own continuance, its own necessities, without some other institution outside capital to enforce a common interest on capitalist society. In his analysis of the development of the 7actory Acts, Marx showed that the intervention of the state became necessary to prevent ) ;hat are the consequences for :ritish industry! of a ma$or  in$ection of new investment by the state into that sector 9 or, on the other hand, of allowing that sector of national! production to run down> hould tariffs be erected to protect this or that branch

of national! production from overseas competition, and with what results for the rest of national capital!> It is clear/ from the history of the relations between the state and capital both in :ritain and elsewhere since at least the 7irst ;orld ;ar that, with important forward and reverse movements, states have become increasingly interventionist! visavis their national capitals!. ?ational capitals! have become less and less notional!, in the sense that large agglomerations of capital are  being and have been formed around the nationstates of western capitalism, these state capitals! consisting above all of the formally nationalised industries whose continued existence depends on a sieable degree of state subsidisation. 'he states have carried out forms of vertical integration! of a variety of sectors of production, collecting them together into statified conglomerates! with more or less integrated internal structures. :ut faced with a crisis in profitability in this or that sector of national! production, nationalisation or statesubsidisation is only one possible response. 7or coherence of policy formation is not by any means to be expected in these circumstances/ rather, ad hoc ad$ustments and decisions, reflecting capital’s essential anarchic planlessness, are all too apparent. (0)+ Mi"e Kidron  put the point well# It is difficult not to conclude that the state’s growth in sie and economic effect has not been a direct  result of pressure from either   business or labour. ;hile organised labour has, on balance, favoured state involvement and capital opposed it, nothing suggests that either attitude has had much effect on the actual course of events since the war. =n the contrary, the state’s growth has been in a series of dis$ointed steps that bear every sign of not representing a coherent attitude wor"ing itself out in institutional form, but rather a series of ad hoc responses to short term problems which could not be dealt with in any other way. ince the problems were shared by more or less all western capitalist countries and their institutional arrangements were similar at the outset, it is not surprising that they adopted similar  approaches and went through a similar course. ()E*+

'hough even this is capable of being read too economistically! in two senses# first, in that it underplays the degree of uneven development! as between nationstates 9 witness the lower level of formal nationalisation etc. in the L economy, especially in the )