Eva Nanopoulos talks to us about her co-edited volume, Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate, published by Palgrave Macmillan (2023).
The volume is a collection of essays on Marxist state theory and the critique of the modern capitalist state. They come from a variety of traditions and cover a variety of topics from general re-appraisals of the capitalist state to investigations of contemporary challenges—including digitalisation, the ecological crisis, the coronavirus pandemic, social reproduction, and war. Yet, they all share a common set of commitments. One is the significance of the state for understanding and overcoming our contemporary crisis. The second is the refusal both to reduce the state to a mere superstructural epiphenomenon and to succumb to the idea that, in capitalist society, the political is somehow independent from the economic. And the last and overarching one is the importance of theorising the specificity of the modern capitalist state. As a whole, the volume does not aim to provide a definite or comprehensive account of the state but to provoke and encourage a ‘new state debate’ building but also updating and extending the rich tradition of Marxist analyses on the topic. Indeed, we gesture explicitly to the broader scope of state theorising that should take place within the Marxism of tomorrow such as the role of the state in the production, reproduction and exploitation of difference along racial, gender, sexual, religious, national and other lines alongside class, to name but one.
Well, what prompted this volume could be described as an ‘aporia’. On the one hand, since the financial crisis of 2007/2008, there has been a marked revival of interest in Marx and Marxism across several disciplines, including law. On the other hand, Marxists have consistently emphasised the importance of the state to understanding capitalism, including in the present conjuncture. And yet, many of the most influential Marxist analyses of the capitalist state date back to the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The conversation on how to revive and re-engage the ‘state debate’ begun, as it increasingly does in our present digital age, in the pages of the blog Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis and Critique, which Rob Hunter and I are involved in editing and to which Rafael Khachaturian contributed. The three of us had never (and still haven’t!) met in person, but as the pandemic hit and zoom meetings became the order of the day, we got the opportunity to get together. In that context it quickly appeared that we all shared the view that the debate should be developed further. All around us, there was evidence that the state was key for understanding and potentially overcoming the crisis of global capitalism. So this is the short version of the story of this collaborative volume but also of a wonderful friendship and, as we hope, the beginning of a new state debate.
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Part 2 of this introduction provides a brief overview of the place of the state in Marxist thought. In addition to the works of Marx and Engels, we draw attention to two particular developments in Marxist state theory that are especially germane to the present volume. One is the notion of the relative autonomy of the political from the economic, capturing the idea that the activity of the state and the resulting class antagonisms are not mere superstructural reflections of a base of economic relations, but structurally determined by the capitalist mode of production, such that the state cannot treated as either an instrument or a subject that can freely implement (or be made to implement) particular policies without respect to the society-pervading imperative that capital be valorised. Elaborations on this approach often describe the capitalist state as a particular terrain that both conditions class struggle and also serves as its object. The other is the concept of the state as an historically-specific social form. Associated with, and developed within, a variety of traditions—such as Frankfurt School critical theory, the Neue Marx-Lektüre (‘new reading of Marx’), and Open Marxism—this position sees the capitalist state not as a distinct social reality but as the specifically political appearance of the determinate social relations that constitute capitalist society. These two developments are by no means symmetrical or neatly complementary.[1] Yet they give form to commonly-shared intuitions about the relationship between the capitalist state and the capitalist economy.
II. Theorising the Capitalist State: A Brief History
Marx himself never propounded a fully-developed critique of the state in any form—capitalist or otherwise. Scattered remarks found throughout writings from all stages of his life reveal a mind that was attentive to organised political authority and its contradictory relationship with relations of production and exchange. However, it is primarily in his earliest writings that Marx focused directly on juridical and political relations as they appear in bourgeois society. Here we encounter some of the themes that would continue to animate Marx’s thinking about the state as he began to focus more of his efforts on the critique of political economy.
In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx discerned the ‘institutionalized illusion’ of society’s separation into civil society and the state, such that the latter appears to be separately constituted, independent from relations of production and exchange (Murray 1988, 32). In actuality, the ‘antinomy of the political state and civil society’ is ‘the contradiction of the abstract political state’ with itself (Marx and Engels 1973, 3:91). The self-contradiction of the ‘political’ state derives from its abstraction from the social relations that condition its own possible existence. The bourgeois state appears as neutral, even natural, and standing above and beyond the sectional and sectoral conflicts that are characteristic of bourgeois society; and yet it is the political appearance of that particular society, and not of any kind of society-in-general. Political relations are no less historically-specific than economic relations; nor can these be comprehended as fully distinct from one another, no matter their apparent independence. Marx famously summarised this claim with recourse to the base/superstructure metaphor in the Introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and reiterated it in the first volume of Capital:
My view is that each particular mode of production, and the relations of production corresponding to it at each given moment, in short ‘the economic structure of society’, is ‘the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness’, and that ‘the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life’ (Marx 1990, I:175).
This claim for the mutual implication of state and economy as historically-determinate forms of social relations is not a denial of the specificity of the state as a definite pattern of social relations. Marx was familiar with the bourgeois state’s appearance as the ‘concentration of bourgeois society’ or the ‘concentrated and organized force of society’ (Marx 1973, 108; 1990, I:915). (Indeed, he developed this insight in an earlier form in the Eighteenth Brumaire, narrating how the prior history and conjunctural class struggles of French society culminated in a new form of state power that only appeared to be independent of society.) This concentrated force may be self-contradictory in its concept, yet its capacities are by no means imaginary. These capacities are themselves contradictory; in the concluding section of the first volume of Capital, Marx surveyed the central, and violent, role of the bourgeois state in the consolidation and generalisation of a society whose most elementary form and foundational mediating category is value: ‘so-called primitive accumulation’ was not the innocent outcome of doux commerce but a history of private and public violence written in ‘letters of blood and fire’ (Marx 1990, I:875). And yet the organised force of bourgeois society could be exercised so as to improve the lot of industrial workers, as Marx famously discussed in chapter 10 of Capital; the machinery of the bourgeois state was not simply subservient to the will of individual capitalists or to a notional common interest of the capitalist class as a whole (Steinberg 2010).
Of course, the Factory Acts were not the first steps on a parliamentary road to socialism. Engels would later refer to the bourgeois state as the ‘ideal personification’ of capital in toto (Marx and Engels 1987, 25:266). This ideal capitalist—precisely because of its constitution as the general, ‘organised force’ of society, in contradiction to the competition between and among particular capitals—was capable of, and indeed the only means for, the articulation of a ‘general interest’ in bourgeois society. In this sense the Factory Acts may be seen as auguring the later reforms that stabilised, rather than inhibited, the expansion of capital, by imposing a kind of rationality and foresight that could not be pursued by individual capitalists, who are otherwise compelled by the law of value to compete with one another by reducing the cost of variable capital.
This conception of the state, however underdeveloped, is unlike the (rather instrumentalist) conception of the state on offer in the Communist Manifesto. Rather than a mere illusion or shroud drawn over class rule, or an instrumentality through which ‘the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests’ against society as a whole,the bourgeois state is instead seen, on this view, as the politico-institutional expression of a society that can reproduce itself only through the continued and expanded accumulation of capital.
[1] For an attempt at establishing a complementarity between these two clusters of views, see Gallas (2011).