Redacción del cuestionario

At first glance the capitalist state appears as a neutral ‘public’ sphere of human activity distinct and autonomous from the ‘private’ sphere of capitalist relations contained

65 Ball (1964), pp.19-20; Jackman et al (1984), pp.184-5; Heathfield and Russell (1996), p.19.

66 Marx (1970), p.32; (1990), p.170; de Brunhoff (1978), ps.9-60, and passim; Fine (1979).

within civil society. The state presents itself as an impartial arbiter, discriminating between competing particular interests to act in the ‘national’ or ‘general’ interest’ for the benefit of all its citizens.⁶⁷ From a Marxist perspective however, such appearances are illusory.

Instead, the state is not seen as a dispassionate force that is external to society, but is regarded as an intrinsic aspect of the capitalist mode of production and to be fundamentally concerned with ensuring the reproduction of capitalist class relations.⁶⁸

The capitalist state is seen to have emerged from the long drawn-out social changes and revolutions that led to the decline of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. The driving force behind these changes is considered to have been class struggle. The resistance of serfs to exploitation on the one hand, and the desire of the lords to impose ever greater exploitation on the other, led to a search for more efficient and profitable ways of extracting surplus labour. This led ultimately to the development of commercial agriculture and industry, the expansion of trade, and to the increasing monetisation of society. Such developments however also led to the recomposition of class relations. The open and directly coercive relations of feudal exploitation were supplanted as capitalism progressed by relations of formally free and equal individuals meeting in the market as buyers and sellers of commodities on the impartial bases of the rule of law and money. Behind this veneer of apparent equality however, class relations had not been abolished but had simply assumed a new form. Ownership of the means of production was now concentrated in the hands of a small minority on the legal basis of the ‘rights’ of private property, while the

67 Such a view of the state is commonly expressed for example in the literature on ‘globalisation’. See Cerny (1990), Ohmae (1990); Hirst and Thompson (1996); Strange (1997).

mass of the population were now forced by the indirect coercive pressures of the market to continually sell their labour power to this minority in exchange for wages.⁶⁹

An inherent and fundamental feature of these social changes was the emergence of the capitalist state. In contrast to the feudal absolutist state in which the political and economic spheres of social life were fused and indistinguishable (a person’s political position determining their economic position in the social hierarchy and vice versa), the capitalist state was predicated instead upon an institutional separation from civil society, and hence upon the delineation of social life into distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’, or

‘political’ and ‘economic’ spheres. In giving political form to the newly constituted relations of production in this way, the capitalist state materialised as an institutional form of social relations designed to uphold and legitimise the formal rights of private property and the inherent class divide this contains. The relation between the state and the process of capitalist production is thus not one which is external and contingent, but one that is internal and necessary. The state itself is conceived in terms of a form of social relations, and as such is seen to be primarily concerned to ensure their reproduction and maintenance.⁷⁰

Such a view of the state thus stands in direct contrast to views that emphasise its

‘fractionalist’, ‘instrumentalist’, ‘pluralist’, or ‘relatively autonomous’ character. The state is not understood as an institutional ‘structure’ capable of being appropriated and wielded by various social groups, sectors, classes, or ‘fractions of capital’ for their own ends, and nor is it seen to be capable of acting either in the interests of one part of capital at the expense of another, or with disregard to ‘economic’ forces. Approaches towards

69 Clarke, (1988), p.17; Holloway (1995). pp.138-41; Burnham (1996), p.99-100: On the emergence of the capitalist state see for example Polanyi (1957); Strayer (1970); Poggi (1978); Anderson (1986).

70 Clarke (1988); Bonefeld et al (1995).

understanding the state which regard it as something that is connected to, but nonetheless external from capitalist society, are all unable to conceptualise the limits to state behaviour in terms of the necessity for it to act in the interests of capital. They are unable for example to explain why the state persistently acts in the interests of capital despite variations in the complexion of the political authorities over time, and are similarly unable to explain instances of similarity in the behaviour of states with different social and political structures during certain historical periods.⁷¹ In contrast, it is through the form of the state itself as a ‘publicly’ constituted institutional framework for upholding the rule of law and money – the necessary conditions for capitalist production and class exploitation – that the necessity for the state to act in the interests of capital is derived.⁷²

The maintenance and reproduction of capitalist relations by the state involves continual action in order to regulate class struggle and to address the various crises that emerge as a result of the instability of the capitalist social form. This does not mean however that the state acts in the interests of all specific capitals, or that it acts in the interests of any particular fraction of capital. Since the circuit of capital exists only as a unity of innumerable competing circuits, and since capital itself needs to be transformed into all three of its money, productive, and commodity forms in order to expand, the state can only seek to provide the necessary conditions within which capital expansion can take place, and hence can act only in the interests of capital-in-general.⁷³

71 Such as the widespread adoption of ‘monetarism’ during the 1980s. For views from a fractionalist perspective see Crouch (1979); Longstreth (1979); Jessop (1983); Ingham (1984); Van der Pijl (1984): For a critique see Clarke (1978): For views from a ‘relative autonomist’ perspective see Block (1977; 1980): For instrumentalism see Miliband (1969).

72 Clarke (1988); Bonefeld (1993).

73 Marx (1992), p.133. writes that: “Money capital, commodity capital and productive capital…do not denote independent varieties of capital whose functions constitute the content of branches of business that are independent and separate from one another. They are simply particular functional forms of industrial capital, which takes on all three forms in turn.” Also see Marx and Engels (1965); Barker (1978); de Brunhoff (1978); Clarke (1988), p.138; Fine (1989), p.178; Bonefeld (1992), pp.116-19; (1993), pp.53-4; Burnham

The key means by which the state does this is through its ‘economic policies’

concerning the management of labour power and money. Through its various social, employment, welfare, and education policies for example, the state seeks to confine working class expectations within the boundaries of profitable capital accumulation and to ensure a sufficiently trained and disciplined workforce for exploitation, whilst through its credit, fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate policies the state seeks to ensure a relatively stable currency and to regulate the price mechanism in a manner conducive to the continued flow of the circuit of capital.⁷⁴ The limits on state behaviour resulting from the specific form of capitalist society however, cannot be fully determined from an analysis of

‘the state’ in isolation. As Barker has pointed out, ‘the state’ does not exist in the singular, but only as part of an international collection of states. A proper understanding of the state and the constraints imposed upon its activities therefore requires an analysis of this international context.⁷⁵