viewpointmag.comhttp://viewpointmag.com/2014/10/29/state-violence-state-control-marxist-state-theory-and-the-critique-of-political-economy/

Chris O'Kane

State Violence, State Control: Marxist State Theory and theCritique of Political Economy

Joachim Sperl, 2014.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a number of movements arose which in different ways, opposed the statusquo.1 At the time, many of us in our exuberance thought these events signaled the end – or at least the beginning ofthe end – of capitalism. Yet from London to Oakland to Madrid to Athens to Cairo, each of these movements were metand outmaneuvered by an institution which was generally neglected in analyses of the final crisis, and the calls tocommunize everything by abolishing the value-form: the state.

This was doubly surprising, for the crisis was also said to be a crisis of neoliberalism, a new regime of financializedaccumulation that had emerged in the 1970s and had transformed capitalist society through what Jamie Peck, NikTheodore, and Neil Brenner have described as “post-1970s patterns of institutional and spatial reorganization”consisting in “the tendential extension of market-based competition and commodification processes into previouslyrelatively insulated realms of social life.”2

While many explanations of how and why this process of neoliberalization occurred abound, Philip Mirowskiperceptively notes that “many authors of a Marxist bent want to portray neoliberalism as the simple deployment ofclass power over the unsuspecting masses, but encounter difficulty in specifying the chains of causality stretchingfrom the elusive executive committee of the capitalist class down to the shopper at Wal-Mart.”3 As Mirowski indicates,much of this explanatory gap in prominent “traditional” and “critical” Marxian accounts of neoliberalism thus centerson the lack of sophisticated analyses of the capitalist state.

Chris Harman, for instance, provides a “Classical Marxist” interpretation of the state in Zombie Capitalism.4 ForHarman there is little need to consider the structure of the capitalist state, how it relates to the capitalist economy, itspeculiar capacities, its means or its ends, or to provide a detailed investigation of how the state participated inregimes of accumulation; for him, the state is a formless instrument of capital, which the ruling class uses to stall theLaw of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall. In this view, the state’s “autonomy” does not consist in its separation

from the capitalist economy or its separated interrelation with it, but in “a limited degree of freedom as to how itenforces the needs of national capital accumulation, not in any choice as to whether to enforce these or not.”5

Consequently, a political class is not separated from the capitalist class, nor is it beholden to a particular politicalrationality implicated in the overall social logic of capital; rather, “state appointees behave as much like capitalists– as living embodiments of capital accumulation at the expense of workers – as do private entrepreneurs, orshareholders.”6 Harman thus argues that the crisis of the 1970s represented “the limits of state capitalism’s ability tomaintain accumulation” in the face of this tendency, leading to a new phase of accumulation in which individual statesact in the interest of global capital.7 Consequently, Harman’s explanation of neoliberalism treats the capitalist rulingclass as the prime mover and the state as its mere instrument, while his definition of neoliberalism is precisely theone that Mirowski criticizes: “Neoliberalism is an ideology primarily used to justify attacks on workers.”8

Despite their opposition to these traditional interpretations of Marx, some of the most prominent proponents of “value-form theory” who address neoliberalism echo Harman’s analysis, albeit in a different register.9 Moishe Postone’s“Theorizing the Contemporary World” parallels Harman by characterizing the historical trajectory of neoliberalism as“the weakening of national, state-centered economic sovereignty and the emergence and consolidation of a neo-liberal global order.”10 Postone’s intervention – which consists of critical remarks on how analyses of neoliberalism byRobert Brenner, David Harvey, and Giovanni Arrighi fail to grasp Marx’s theory of value – makes the case thatproperly understanding Marx’s theory of value can provide a full picture of the dynamic of capitalist, and thusneoliberal, society. Although Postone remarks in passing that the state should be analyzed as a historically-specificform, he does not say why this is particularly important, how this would change his analysis, or how it relates to hisinterpretation of Marx’s theory of value. Like Harman but on a different theoretical basis, he ultimately reduces thestate to an incidental instantiation of capital.

Taken together, Harman and Postone’s analyses are representative of the type of Marxist theory that has underlaidapproaches to the crisis. Unfortunately, they can also be said to represent the general theoretical paucity of statetheory in much of the Marxian tradition, where the state is often treated as a formless instrument or a supraindividualform that merely reflects a given characterization of the dynamic of valorization. The explanatory capacities of theseapproaches are called into question not only by the quashing of these post-crisis movements by the state, but also bythe underlying character of the neoliberal project itself, which Mirowski and Peck both show to be a state-drivenenterprise that became more extensive in the wake of periodic global economic crises since the 1970s.11

Nonetheless, Mirowski and Peck have their own limitations. They treat neoliberalism as a political project or as apolitical rationality, but they do not consider how such a political rationality relates to the social logic andcorresponding behavioral rationality of capital. This means they do not consider how this perspective could provide aconception of the capitalist state that might help us further understand neoliberalism, the neoliberal state and theneoliberalization of global society in relation to global capitalism.

These omissions not only raise the question of whether the state can be brought back into Marxist accounts ofneoliberalism, but if a Marxist theory of the state can be devised that the treats the state as integral to the dynamic ofaccumulation – in a way that explains the development and pervasiveness of neoliberalism, sets the stage for anunderstanding of the recent waves of state-backed repression, and in so doing contributes to a more sober analysesof the overcoming of capitalist society. This once again raises the vexed question of the Marxist theory of thecapitalist state – is a theory available which can explain the relation between the capitalist state and the capitalisteconomy, the means and ends of the capitalist state, which overcomes the one-sided approaches of Harman andPostone?

Such a conception would view the state as a historically specific entity, separate from yet interrelated with thecapitalist economy, endowed with form-determined capacities that are integral to the process of valorization andsocial reproduction. Moreover, while these capacities would have certain instrumental uses, their utilization would notbe deduced from the direct subordination of the state apparatus or its functionaries to capital or the capitalist class,but from a perspective which shows how the state’s role in this overarching social dynamic instantiates a political

rationality that compels such a utilization, in order to reproduce the state and capitalist society. This theory would alsoseek to explain the nature and the purpose of the capitalist state and its capacities, providing a framework for theanalysis of state policies as the instrumentalization of these form-determined abilities. In order to determine thepossibility of advancing such a theory, we will start by reviewing important moments in the history of Marxian statetheory.

Marx’s theories of the state

As Bob Jessop and others have noted, Marx himself did not present “a definitive analysis” of the capitalist state.12

Instead, a variety of conceptions of the state can be drawn from his work. In early texts such as “On The JewishQuestion” (1843) and “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right ” (1844), written prior to his firstengagement with political economy, Marx conceives of the state as the alienated representation of a humancommunity premised on the separation between the state and civil society. Following Marx’s initial criticisms ofpolitical economy, The German Ideology (1845) conceives of the state as a class entity that represents particularclass interests as universal. However, Marx’s most influential comments on the state in this period are the famouslines from The Communist Manifesto (1848) – “The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee formanaging the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” – which describe the state as an instrument in the playing outof the history of class struggle.13 Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851) provides a more complexanalysis of the relationship between the state and class struggle, in his account of the intra-state conflicts betweenclass fractions in Bonaparte’s coup of 1851.

While Jessop and others treat these moments in the development of Marx’s thought as distinct, or even antithetical,Michael Heinrich notes they are also indicative of the period before Marx fully developed his critique of politicaleconomy.14 Despite their differences, these “pre-critical” conceptions of the state do not investigate its historicallyspecific form, and thus lack an account of how such a form participates in the peculiar dynamic of capitalistvalorization.

Marx had planned to provide such an account as part of his critique of political economy. Unfortunately, it was nevercompleted. Nevertheless, he made scattered references to such a form-analytic conception of the state in Volume 3 ofCapital (1863-1883), calling it “the specific political form” that corresponds to the “specific economic form” of capitalistsocial production. He also noted that such a “specific economic form” grows directly out of the particular manner inwhich “unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of direct producers,” which “determines the relationship of the rulers andthe ruled.” The “specific political form” of the state, in other words, is constituted by the historically specific relations ofproduction, possessing a “political relation of sovereignty” that is separate but also embedded in this determinateeconomic form. Finally, he noted that these forms appeared in “infinite variations and gradations” in differentempirical circumstances:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers,determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn,reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of theeconomic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, therebysimultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of theconditions of production to the direct producers – a relation always naturally corresponding to adefinite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity – whichreveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political formof the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.This does not prevent the same economic basis – the same from the standpoint of its main conditions– due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, externalhistorical influences, etc. from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be

ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given circumstances.15

Taken in tandem with the parts of his critique of political economy that Marx did complete, this would imply that the“specific political form” of the capitalist state corresponds to and reacts upon the specific economic form of capitalistsocial production.

But what is this economic form? For Marx, “capital is not a thing, but rather a definite social production relation,belonging to a definite historical formation of society, which is manifested in a thing and lends this thing a specificsocial character.”16 Succinctly put, this definite social production relation is manifested in the social character of athing because the capitalist mode of production is characterized by an atomized social division of labor in whichproduction occurs for the purpose of exchange. This, in turn, means that some type of general equivalent isnecessary to facilitate exchange. Money is this equivalent. But because money is the only equivalent that facilitatesexchange, it acquires what Marx refers to as a “social power,” this “thing’s” social character. This also means, asMarx shows in the course of his further presentation in Capital, that since the capitalist mode of production consistsin a class antagonism in which a class of workers are compelled, in order to reproduce themselves, to sell their labor-power to a class of capitalists who are then compelled to pump out unpaid surplus-labor in order to sell commoditiesand valorize capital, that the capitalist process of valorization occurs through the medium of money for the sake ofacquiring more money. Money thus becomes the sole aim of production, “the self-sufficient purpose of the sale,” andthus the ends of the process of valorization, which is simultaneously one of reproduction.17 Surplus value, as “thespecific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers” in order to valorize capital,is the means of this process. This “definite social production relation” – the “specific economic form” of capitalism – isthus manifest in money’s social character, which in the process of valorization serves as the subject of a socialdynamic that reproduces these relations by determining the actions of capitalists and proletarians.18 It finds itspresuppositions in conditions of separation, and is marked by an antagonism of exploitation and domination.

In conjunction with such a conception of this “specific economic form,” Marx’s fragmentary account of the state thusimplies that a form-analytic theory of the capitalist state would consist in an explication of a historically specific“political form that corresponds to these peculiarities of the capitalist social form.” It further implies that the relation ofsovereignty, which characterizes this “specific” political form, corresponds to the ends of this economic form: theprocess of valorization, which “determines the actions of the rulers and the ruled.” Such a notion shows that at thisstage in his work, Marx does not conceive of the state as a formless entity in a decontexualized history of classstruggle, while the reference to its “hidden basis” shows that Marx does not see it as an impersonal form extraneousto it. Rather, it indicates that he conceived of the state as a form-determined instrument in which the specific form ofthe state and its political relation of sovereignty correspond to and serve the ends of the capitalist process ofvalorization. This would seem to indicate that the state as a form is separate from, yet also corresponds to, thecapitalist economy, and that “the political form” it possesses by virtue of this separation consists in a “relation ofsovereignty” in which its form-determined abilities are utilized as instruments by its functionaries, who are compelledto reinforce and react upon the peculiar antagonisms of exploitation, domination, and separation that are the premiseand the result of capitalist process of valorization.19

Elements of such a theory can be seen in the instances in Capital where the state is shown to enforce laws on thebasis of formal freedom and equality, codifying private property and the sale of labor-power and thus functioning asintegral to the process of valorization. It can also be seen to utilize these form-determined capacities in aninstrumental manner, in the sections on the length of the working day and primitive accumulation, where theimpersonal entity of the state acts as the “concentrated and organised force of society” by implementing theseparation of the worker from the means of production and modifying the length of the working day – thus aligningpolitical rationality with the social logic of capital in order to assure valorization and reproduction.20 While theincomplete status of Capital means that Marx never aligned the state with the world market, these comments implythat Marx’s critique of political economy conceives of the state as an entity which is separate yet integral to the

capitalist social form; a form-determined instrument for the purpose of perpetuating and extending capitalist socialproduction.21 Yet it is also the case that fragments such as these are few and far between in the extant manuscriptsthat make up the unfinished project of the critique of political economy.

Classical Marxism

Engels’s transformation of these manuscripts into volumes 2 (1885) and 3 (1894) of Capital provided an invaluableservice under impossible conditions. However, the hegemonic logico-historical interpretation he played an essentialpart in formulating, in conjunction with the reception of the pre-critical Marx and Engel’s own remarks on the state,formed the basis for the most prominent theories of the state in classical Marxism and Western Marxism.22

This is particularly the case for the Classical Marxist theories of the state, which would continue to be of influence inthe evolution of “Classical Marxism” in the 20th century: the Social-Democratic and Imperialist theories of the state.23

As Ingo Elbe notes, Engels’s “content-based” conception of the state as “the mere instrument” of the ruling class“paved the way” for these theories.24 The Classical Marxist theory of the state followed a logico-historical reading ofCapital and Engels’s notion that the state acted as “real total social capitalist”25 to argue that that the state had beenused as an instrument by the ruling class to take “on many of the functions of capital, in the attempt to avert aneconomic crisis and to stabilise the class struggle,” thus ushering in the new historical stage of monopolycapitalism.26 Although this theory, which is echoed in Harman’s work, can be said to offer an account of the state’srole in accumulation, it lacks a form-analytic dimension. Instead of explaining how the state comes to exist as aseparate entity serving the ends of the particular social dynamic of capitalist valorization, a dynamic that compels theactions of the rulers and the ruled, this formless theory conceived of the state as a neutral instrument which was usedby the capitalist class to direct the capitalist economy – and which could also be used by proletarians to direct thecommunist economy.

The Frankfurt School

Despite their mutual animosity, the Althusserian and Hegelian-Marxist strands of Western Marxism both embeddedthis classical account in more complex social theories. This was notably the case with the theories of the statepromulgated by those associated with the Institute for Social Research, which, in spite of their variation, can be seento have married such an instrumentalist account of the state to an analysis of social institutions, drawing on theWeberian elements of Lukács’s theory of reification.

Friedrich Pollock and Max Horkheimer’s theory of the state-capitalist “Authoritarian State” proposed a particularlogico-historical social theory, with a formless conception of the state as a rationalizing instrument. In their analysis ofstate capitalism, which they posited as the latest stage of capitalism’s historical development, the authoritarian statewas said to have taken on the role of total social capital, with the “new ruling class” using the state to “totallyadminister” society. In Pollock’s succinct summarization, this “new state openly appears as an institution in which allearthly power is embodied and which serves the new ruling class as a tool for its power politics.”27 The new rulingclass uses the state to “control everything it wants to” including “the general economic plan” of production andcirculation, “foreign policy, rights and duties,” and the “life and death of the individual.”28

While Postone rightly criticizes the “Traditional Marxist” conception of the capitalist economy upon which Pollock andHorkheimer rely, for conceiving of value as a trans-historical mode of market allocation that has been superseded bythe state’s management of distribution, his paradigmatic treatment of these figures discounts the more complextheories of the state and the capitalist economy that were formulated by associates of the Frankfurt School.29 FranzNeumann’s account of the Nazism argued, contra Pollock and his analysis of a state-controlled economy, that anensemble of monopolies had aligned to use the German state as “the power instrument of a new ruling group” in orderto institute a “totalitarian form of state capitalism.”30 Marcuse’s notion that the “National Socialist state” was “thegovernment of hypostatized economic, social, and political forces” lies somewhere in between Pollock and

Neumann.31 Finally, Adorno’s “Reflections on Class Theory” posits that as a result of the outcome of the dynamismof reified social relations, the state could be used as a rationalizing instrument under the monopoly rule of thecapitalist class.32

Aspects of Neumann’s and Adorno’s analysis are brought together in Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s The Economy and ClassStructure of German Fascism. In many ways this often neglected work offers the most complex theoretical andhistorically-embedded account of the state in this generation of Frankfurt School critical theory.33 Echoing Adorno,Sohn-Rethel conceives of the state on a theoretical level as a rationalizing instrument that enforces capitalistvalorization. This is reflected in a historical analysis that supplements Neumann’s account of the German fascism byarguing that a constellation of monopoly forces aligned with the Nazi Party in order to institute a new accumulationregime. In such an accumulation regime, the German fascist state acted as the managerial apparatus of monopolycapital by implementing coercive labour policies that rationalized the valorization of absolute surplus value.34

By providing an account of how a sector of German capital was compelled to enter into an agreement with the NaziParty in order to utilize the institution of German state to implement and enforce policies that spurred valorization,Sohn-Rethel provides a sophisticated theoretical account of the state as an instrument of rationalization that isutilized in class struggle for the purpose of valorization. He also argues that the class fraction that wields thisinstrument is compelled by the overarching imperatives of valorization. Yet, despite a deeper socio-theoreticalaccount of the state, Sohn-Rethel’s and other Frankfurtian theories of the state lacked the explanatory dimensions ofa form-analytic account. Indeed, this is perhaps why its most influential proponents relied on Weberian notions ofrationalized administration to explain the anonymous and impersonal instrumental function of the state, rather thanaligning these properties with an account of the capitalist social form of production.

Althusser

Louis Althusser, like the theorists of the Frankfurt School, also added a sophisticated socio-theoretical dimension tothe formless instrumentalist conception of the state. Yet in pointed contrast to the Frankfurt School, the Althusseriantheory of the state developed out of Althusser’s reinterpretation of the topology of base and superstructure, which inits classical version held that Marx’s social theory asserted the primacy of economic base, and the subordination ofthe political-legal and ideological superstructure. Althusser’s notion of the state as an instrument emerged from amulti-level reframing of the relation between base and superstructure, characterized by complex relations ofoverdetermination, rather than form-analytic social theory.

This was notably the case in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” which sought to make the ClassicalMarxist theory of the state less descriptive and “more precise” by elaborating on the complementary relation of therepressive and ideological functions of state apparatuses in the reproduction of the relations of production.35

Although the majority of this essay focused on how ideological apparatuses contributed to reproduction, Althusserwould later fill out and amend his theory of the state in the remarkable “Marx in His Limits.” Like Sohn-Rethel’scontribution, this work offers a sophisticated theoretical formulation of the repressive function of the instrument of thestate. It also offers a formulation of the peculiar structure of the state that revises the earlier theoretical architecture ofthe levels of the base and superstructure, for the more reciprocal notions of separation and interrelation. Finally, iteven revises Althusser’s earlier criticisms of fetishism.

These points are brought together in a conception of the state as a repressive instrument by virtue of its structuralseparation from class struggle:

what makes the state the state… is the fact that the state is made in order to be, as far as possible,separate from class struggle… in order to serve as an instrument in the hands of those who holdpower. The fact that the state “is made for this purpose” is inscribed in its structure, in the statehierarchy, and in the obedience (as well as the mandatory reserve) required of all civil servants,

whatever their post.36

Consequently, the state is “separate” and “above classes” only in order to ensure that the dominant class can ensurethe reproduction of the conditions of domination, with the “ensemble of elements” that make up the state working“together to the same end.” For Althusser, the goal of reproduction “does not consist solely in the reproduction of theconditions of ‘social relations’ and, ultimately, the ‘productive relations’; it also includes the reproduction of thematerial conditions of the relations of production and exploitation.”37 The emphasis, for Althusser, lay in the way thatthe state obscured the reality of the class antagonism by virtue of its structural separation from the economy: “thecircle of the reproduction of the state in its functions as an instrument for the reproduction of the conditions ofproduction, hence of exploitation, hence of the conditions of existence of the domination of the exploiting class’,constitutes ‘in and of itself’, the supreme objective mystification.”38

Such a theory of the state clearly draws on the late Marx, to conceive of the state as a specific entity that isstructurally separate from but still connected to the dynamic of class struggle qua social reproduction. Yet for all of itsadvances on his earlier account, as with Sohn-Rethel, the structural-instrumental role the state plays in this processof reproduction is not linked to an account of the specific economic form that Marx discloses in his critique of politicaleconomy. This diminishes Althusser’s account of how this process of social reproduction comes about through thespecific dynamic of the valorization process, thus preventing him from explaining the form-determination of the state’sstructural-instrumentality. It is the state theories that came in wake of the “New Reading of Marx” that wouldemphasize these form-determined elements.

New Readings

What is known as the “New German Reading of Marx” emerged in the 1960s in West Germany. As pioneered byHans-Georg Backhaus and Helmut Reichelt, this new reading consisted in a reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of valuewhich brought the form-analytic element of Marx’s critique of political economy to the forefront. Backhaus andReichelt’s interpretation of this dimension rested on “reconstructing” what they termed the “esoteric” theory of value,which they argued had been obscured in the published volumes of Capital. In contrast to traditional interpretations ofMarx’s theory of value, Backhaus and Reichelt argued that this esoteric theory, which centered on theirunderstanding of the dialectic of the value-form, consisted in a supraindividual type of social rationality thatcompelled individuals on both sides of the class relation.

This conceptual and methodological focus was an influence on the West German “State Derivation Debate,” whichtook place over the course of the 1970s. The approach that characterizes this debate also echoed, and at a certainpoint explicitly drew on, the state theory of Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis. As early as 1923, Pashukanishad criticized Marxist theories that simply focused on the content of the state. In contrast, Pashukanis’s theoryfocused on why the dominance of the capitalist class takes “on the form of official state domination,” by deriving theform of capitalist law and the capitalist state from commodity production.39 Drawing on a form-analytic interpretationof Marx’s theory of value, he argued that the social relations of capitalist society constitute capitalist laws and acapitalist state which codify and enforce the social form of capitalist social relations as relations between things. ForPashukanis, capitalist law and the capitalist state were thus “forms” logically derived from the commodity-form.

As John Holloway and Sol Picciotto point out, the Derivation Debate emerged in the context of the first significantrecession in postwar West Germany; the election of a social-liberal coalition, which posed the issue of reformism; andthe eclipse of the student movement.40 These developments called into question Classical Marxist state theories,which held that the state management of the economy would prevent economic crises, and also raised questionsabout the structure and limits of the capitalist state.

Many aspects of this political context had already been addressed by Johannes Agnoli. Although Agnoli was adamantthat the state could not be “derived,” since it was already there, his influential essay in Die Transformation der

Demokratie (1967) held that the state’s role in maintaining freedom and equality through law contributed to thereproduction of capitalist society, not only by enforcing property rights, but also by transforming class relations intosocial relations between abstract and atomized individuals. His idea of “statification,” moreover, also provided ahistorical account of how the student movement and attempts at reformism were subsumed by these overridingpolitical structures. Agnoli’s work as a whole thus provided an analysis of the capitalist state that focused on how thepolitical capacities of the state ensure the economic processes of valorization and reproduction, and how thestructure of the state compels functionaries, no matter what their ostensible “political” orientation, to instrumentalizethese capacities.41

These methodological influences and contextual developments can be seen in the work of Wolfgang Müller andChristel Neüsuss, who launched the debate, and can thus be seen to lay out the contours of its approach to Marxiststate theory. In opposition to instrumentalist theories, especially those of the Frankfurt School, they stated that “thedefinition and criticism of state institutions as the instruments of manipulation of the ruling class, does not enable us todiscover the limits of that manipulation.”42 Rather, they held that Marxist state theory should provide “a critique of thedevelopment of the various functions of the modern state.”43 As a result, mirroring Pashukanis, Müller and Neüsussargued that these functions “can only be revealed by an analysis which shows in detail the needs for and the limits tostate intervention, arising from the contradictions of the capitalist process of production as a labour-process and avalorization-process.”44 The contributions to this debate which followed thus centered on explaining the necessaryfunction of the capitalist state, and its limits, by deriving the form of the state from the dynamic of valorization.

Following John Holloway and Sol Picciotto, we can identify three main approaches to this problematic. The first tookissue with theories such as those of Pollock and Horkheimer and argued that the state’s institutional separation fromthe capitalist economy was key to understanding its role in the valorization process. This approach held that form ofthe state was necessary for the continued existence of capitalist society, since it stood above the competition ofindividual capitals in order to assure the system’s reproduction.”45 The second centered on providing a moresophisticated logical derivation of the state form from the order of presentation in Capital, while also establishing itsnecessity on this basis. This approach systematically derived the necessity and possibility of the state from the formsof appearance of capitalist social relations, in which all members of society, as owners of various sources ofrevenue, seem to have common interests, thus rendering an autonomous state necessary in order for these commoninterests to be realized outside of the sphere of competition. The third moved from these forms of appearance tocapitalist social relations themselves. In contrast to the first two approaches, which can be seen to establish thenecessity of the state as an ex post facto functional supplement to a fully articulated account of the valorizationprocess, Joachim Hirsch’s contribution argued that a “theory of the bourgeois state” is “a matter of defining thebourgeois state as the expression of a specific historical form of class rule and not simply as the bearer of particularsocial functions.”46 This led Hirsch to derive the “possibility” and “general necessity” of the state from the capitalrelation, arguing that the particular form of the state abstracted “relations of force from the immediate process ofproduction, thus constituting discrete ‘political’ and ‘economic’ spheres,” which were integral to reproducing thisrelation.47 In so doing, Hirsch’s “elements of a theory of the bourgeois state” also addressed the shortcomings of theother types of contributions – namely the separation of the state-form from the capital-relation – while also pointing tothe importance of analyzing the state and social reproduction in the context of the world market.48

Despite these different points of emphasis, as a whole, the State Derivation Debate thus put forward a theoreticalconception of the state that broke with instrumentalist interpretations. The participants convincingly argued against aconception of the state as a formless instrument that directed the economy, to conceive of the state’s impersonal formand separation from the capitalist economy as necessary for the reproduction of capitalist society. This foregroundingof form-determination in state theory was taken up by a number of the German state theories that followed.

The World Market Debate

Drawing on and advancing elements of Hirsch’s work, the German “World Market Debate” revolved around placing a

form-analytic conception of the state in the concrete context of the world market. Christel Neusüss’s, Klaus Busch’s,and Claudia von Braunmühl’s contributions to this debate thus drew on Marx’s comments in the Grundrisse that the“tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself,” and developed accounts of howthe law of value operated through the world market. In so doing, they relied on the value-theoretic conception ofvalorization as a process that “imposes a particular logic upon people,” while also echoing insights from the StateDerivation Debate that capitalism’s crisis-prone tendencies can only be regulated if “the capitalist state is able to formand survive as a separate and relatively autonomous” entity.49 Yet in contrast to these approaches, the contributionsto the World-Market Debate started from the methodological premises of a plurality of states in “multipolar” worldcapitalism.

Neusüss’s and Busch’s theories attempted to apply their interpretation of Marx’s theory of value to the world marketby conceiving of it as a “combination of different nationally delineated spheres.” In contrast to the Derivation Debate,they held that that “an analysis of the world-market motion of capital could not be derived seamlessly from the innernature of capital,” but had to occur in “modified forms.” Of the two, Neusüss provided a particular focus on the state,as an entity “that rests on a capitalist base, but is also ‘beside and outside it.’” She argued that the state wasresponsible for creating the “general material preconditions for production” and an “internal sphere of circulation” fornational total social capital by enabling primitive accumulation, capitalist legal relations, thus guaranteeing themovement of capital and labor and facilitating the imposition of the law of value.50

Von Braunmühl attacked Neusüss’s and Busch’s ideas of “modified forms,” contending that value always appears insuch a manner. She also held that the state could not be regarded as external to value theory:

The form of the bourgeois nation state, of the world market organized as nation states, acquires, as abounded, legally sovereign centre of a capitalist complex of exchange and production, the function ofsecuring, both internally and externally, the politico-economic power of the bourgeoisies competing inthe “international system.” The form, however great its economic significance… is ultimately notcomprehensible without recourse to the political moment of domination which is implicit in theeconomic relation of force between wage labour and capital, and without reference to the competingclaims to rule advanced by rival bearers of authority.51

Von Braunmühl thus argued that the world market was “the appropriate level from which to observe the motion ofcapital and the effect of the law of value in general,” and that it was not the capitalist state as such that should beconceptualized but “the specific political organisation of the world market in many states.”52 Consequently, inopposition to the Derviation Debate, von Braunmühl made the case that “the form of the state as a politicalorganisation of ‘separate and distinct relations of reproduction’” cannot be “derived from the merely internaldimensions of a commodity-producing class society alone – the role of the state in question in its specific relationshipwith the world market and with other states must always be included in the analysis from the outset.”53

These premises led von Braunmühl to argue on a theoretical level that the state should be conceived from theperspective of the internal dynamic of national capital and the external one of the world market. The fact of “politicaland economic rule by internationally competing ruling classes” was achieved through the political functions of asovereign state, which could secure the necessary conditions within the nation state framework.54

While Nachtway and Brink point to a number of shortcomings in the World-Market Debate, and its prematuredissolution, it did point out the importance of conceiving of form-analytic interpretations of the state from theperspective of the world market and a plurality of states, building on dimensions of Marx’s incomplete work andpointing to the shortfalls of deriving the form of capitalist state as such.

Weaving the strands

The Althusserian and critical-Marxian theories that followed took aspects of these German contributions on board,while also trying to integrate them with an account of social struggles. This was particularly the case in theConference of Socialist Economists (CSE) debate, in which Open Marxists, such as John Holloway and SimonClarke, stressed the dimensions of class struggle that were articulated in the internal relation between the state andthe economy. It was also the case for other participants, such as Bob Jessop, who followed Poulantzas andintegrated elements of the form-analysis into a theory of the state’s relative autonomy, within a broader multi-levelsocial theory. The work of Werner Bonefeld and John Milios can be seen to weave these strands, reuniting FrankfurtSchool critical theory and Althusserian theory respectively with more complex theories of the state that draw on value-form theory, Pashukanis, Agnoli, the State Derivation Debate and the World Market Debate.

However, these contributions bring us back to the question of neoliberalism. As we have seen, Peck and Mirowskishow that neoliberalism was inextricably linked with the state, which is an an explanatory dimension that is absentfrom prevalent Marxist accounts. Yet at the same time, Mirowski and Peck both refrain from considering whatexplanatory dimensions a more rigorous Marxian theory of the neoliberal state and neoliberalism would offer: linkingneoliberal rationality to the social logic of capital by aligning the strong neoliberal state with the process ofvalorization. As I show in closing, Bonefeld’s and Milios’s recent writings can be brought together to lay thegroundwork for such an explanation, providing a basis for an understanding of the strong capitalist state’s role in thedevelopment and continued reproduction of neoliberal capitalism, and of the way that neoliberal rationalitycorresponds to the political rationality of capitalism.

Neoliberalism and the strong state

Werner Bonefeld’s account of the social constitution of the form of the capitalist state holds that the capitalisteconomy and the capitalist state are a “contradictory unity” that is created by the “substantive abstraction of classantagonism,” with the capitalist state utilizing its form-determined political capacities to reproduce this classantagonism. The specific antagonism of capitalist class struggle is the “historical result” of primitive accumulation. Asa result, the world market is derived from “the contradictory existence of abstract labour as the social form of wealthfounded on exploitation,” which in turn determines the form of the state: “the development of the state needs to beseen as one in which the contradictory unity of surplus value production is processed in a political form, as a momentof the same process of class struggle: social reproduction as, and in and against, domination.” Bonefeld argues thatthis antagonism is also at the heart of “the harmonies of formal equality and formal freedom,” which are in factsystematic with political domination. The form of the state “concentrates the social reality of exploitation in andthrough the guarantee of formal freedom and formal equality of property rights.” Drawing on Agnoli, Bonefeld alsofocuses on how these legal and political forms are instrumentalized to assure reproduction. As he sees it, “thepolitical guarantee of the right of property determines the state as a strong state” which “imposes the rationality andequality of the right of property over society in the attempt to contain the social antagonism of capital and labour bythe force of law.”55 This theory of the state can thus be seen to align a number of insights from the form-analyticconception of the state with an account of class struggle, in order to understand the strong state as a separate yetinterrelated entity, by virtue of the form-determined role it plays in reproducing the capitalist class antagonism.

Bonefeld’s recent work, written following the 2008 crisis, can thus be seen to provide a theoretical rebuttal ofanalyses of neoliberalism that ignored or diminished the role of the state, by theoretically elaborating how theneoliberal state is exemplary of the form-determined instrumental capacities of the capitalist state. This is a theory ofpolitical economy as a political practice, which shows how its “cohesion, organization, integration and reproductionare matters of state.”56 Following Agnoli, Bonefeld succinctly formulates the ends of such a political practice: “crudelyput, the purpose of capital is to accumulate extracted surplus value, and the state is the political form of thatpurpose.” He provides an account of how this purpose is achieved by the instrumentalization of the form-determinedcapacities of the state for purpose of valorization. As he argues, the state “facilitates the order of economic freedom bymeans of the force of law-making violence”; sustains the capitalist relations of production and exchange by

depoliticizing “socio-economic relations”; guarantees “contractual relations of social interaction”; seeks the furtherprogress of the system of free labor by facilitating the “cheapness of provision”; and extends these relations by“securing free and equal market relations.”57 The “strong state” thus utilizes its form-determined capacities in aninstrumental manner, to organize, integrate, sustain, and extend the social relation at the heart of the peculiardynamic of valorization for the purpose of accumulating surplus value.

Bonefeld also enumerates how the “market-facilitating” coercive force of the strong neoliberal state achieves theseends in the three areas of political-legal form-determined instrumentality outlined above. He argues that capitalistrelations have been sustained and extended “over the past 30 years” by “the accumulation of potentially fictitiouswealth” – through “the coercive control of labour, from debt bondage to new enclosures,” and from “the deregulationof conditions to the privatization of risk.”58 Thus, in contrast to prevalent characterizations of the neoliberal state as aweak state that is separate from the market, unwilling and unable to guard it, Bonefeld argues: “The conventionalview that neoliberalism has to do with the weakening of the state has little, if anything, to do with the neoliberalconception of the free economy.”59 Rather, since “the free market requires the strong, market-facilitating state, but itis also dependent on the state as the coercive force of that freedom,” the “neoliberal demand for the strong state is ademand for the limited state, one that limits itself to the task of making the economy of free labour effective.”60 Thismeans that “the capitalist state is fundamentally a liberal state” and that the neoliberal state is typical of thesefundamental qualities, because “the neoliberal state functions as a market facilitating state.”61

The social violence of capital

Like Bonfeld, John Milios also provides a theory of the capitalist state that draws important elements from form-analytic state theory.62 He also aligns these insights with the constitutive social dynamic of class struggle, but hedoes so from an Althusserian perspective. Although Milios rightly notes that Althusser’s “approach to value theory”was, at best, “ambiguous,” he also identifies several points of compatibility between Althusser’s work and form-analysis:

the predicative and categorical manner in which Althusser declares Marx’s rupture with PoliticalEconomy, as well as the basic parameters of his analysis, i.e. his approach to materialist dialectics, theepistemological break, the eccentric conception of social totality, the primacy of class struggle, therelative autonomy and interpenetration of the various practices, point to the theoretical potential implicitin the comprehension of Marx’s monetary theory of value, a key-issue of which is the insistence on thesignificance of the concept of value-form.63

This approach also draws on Milios’s interpretation of Pashukanis, who provided an account of the “process ofsimultaneous formation of the interacting elements” of the capitalist mode of production, “comprising among otherthings the formation of the (bourgeois civil) law and the ideology/philosophy which accompanies it.”64 Following theAlthusserian conception of the “primacy of class struggle,” Milios contends that the capitalist mode of production(CMP) is constituted by two contradictions. The “principal contradiction” is the “contradiction” of the relations ofproduction, which “divides society into two fundamental (and unequal) classes: the capitalist and working classes.”65

Yet in the CMP, these “agents of production embody other secondary power relations (contradictions)” because“certain relations of production presuppose the existence of specific legal-political and ideological relations: the so-called superstructure.”66 Therefore, while these “secondary contradictions are not the pure expressions of theprincipal contradiction,” they are “actually constitute its condition of existence, just as the principal contradictionconstitutes their condition of existence.”67 Thus, rather than a one-way determinism, for Milios, the relationshipbetween these contradictions is reciprocal; for, while in the “last instance” the relations of production ultimately“determine the general form of the superstructure,” these secondary determinations also possesses “relative

autonomy” and act on the base.68 Consequently, “the (capitalist) mode of production is not exclusively an economicrelation. It applies at all levels of society (social instances). It also includes the core of (capitalist) political andideological relations of power, that is the particular structure of the capitalist state.”69

As a consequence, while Milios derives the state from class struggle, he also draws on accounts for the constitutionof the form of the state, as a structural entity that is a separate yet interrelated aspect of the CMP. The “particularstructure of the capitalist state” thus consists in “economic and political” powers, all of which possess “impersonalstructures that function to ensure the overall preservation and reproduction” of the CMP.70 Since this structurecorresponds to class domination, Milios argues, like Bonefeld, that these legal and political capacities are also usedas instruments to ensure the preservation and reproduction of the class antagonism: “the state, as the centre for theexercise of capitalist class power, is the mechanism for concentrating the generalized social violence of capital.”71

Following the Althusser of “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Milios argues that this form-determinedinstrumentalization occurs at two levels. The “economic level” is where “the state makes a decisive contribution tocreating the overall material conditions for reproduction of capitalist relations.” It formulates politico-legal policies “formanaging the workforce, interventions for an increase in the profitability of aggregate social capital, the nationalcurrency and state management of money, the institutional and legal framework safeguarding the “freedom” of themarket, mechanisms for disciplining labour power and institutions of social pacification.”72 At the “political andideological-cultural level,” the state has the important function of legitimating “the exercise of bourgeois politicalpower” – it provides a national framework for the ideology of capitalist power, constituting capital as “socio-nationalcapital.” As a whole, “capitalist exploitation is rendered possible, and appears as a ‘natural order,’ by virtue of thefunctioning of the state.”73

Mirroring Bonefeld, Milios’s account of the state thus aligns important form-analytic concerns with an account of theconstitutive properties of class struggle. In this theorization, the state is not merely instrumental, nor is it simply anautonomous form.74 Rather, for Milios, the capitalist state is, “in reality: the political condensation of class relations ofdomination, the factor that underwrites the cohesion of capitalist society.”75

Milios provides an account of the neoliberalization of capitalist society that also reflects the “market facilitating”properties of the neoliberal state that Bonefeld identifies. He defines neoliberalism as a “historically specific form oforganization of capitalist power on a social-wide scale, wherein governmentality through financial markets acquires acrucial role.”76 This leads Milios to argue that this historically specific organization consisted in the “recomposition” ofthe CMP, a “reforming all components involved, in a way that secures the reproduction of the dominant (neoliberal)capitalist paradigm.”77 As the mechanism for concentrating the generalized social violence of capital, the capitaliststate facilitated this process of neoliberalization.

This is relayed in Milios’s account of the four basic elements of recomposition that constituted the neoliberal model,which the state was instrumental in instituting. The first consisted in repressive methods and monetarist policies thatderegulated the job market, boosting unemployment, squeezing wages, and lessening the power of wage-earners.The second, which is linked to the first, entailed outsourcing in order to devalue “non-competitive” capital and furtherdiscipline labor. These were complemented by the third, the privatization and recomposition of state activities, whichcreated a “basis for an increase in the debt of households,” generating the potential for debt in other privatizedareas. Finally, consent to this model was secured by the possibility of “access to cheap loans” and a variety otherfinancialized entities.78

Consequently, contra Harman and Postone, for Milios, neoliberalization did not erode the state, because it did notdiminish its form-determined purpose. Rather, he holds that the capitalist state’s neoliberal recompositionstrengthened the state’s ability to facilitate these ends. In neoliberalism, the capitalist state’s organization andreproduction of “the economic and political dominance of capital” is recomposed and extended to the historicallyspecific governmentality of financialization, which has engendered “new kinds of rationality for the promotion of

exploitation strategies based on the circuit of capital that presume compliance with the laws of the capitalistsystem.”79 Neoliberalization has thus led to “embedding” a “particular form of capitalist state power, of classgovernance, undoubtedly more authoritarian, crude, and violent” in neoliberal valorization and social reproduction.80

We are not far from Bonefeld’s theory of the market-facilitating purpose of the strong neoliberal state.

Vital politics as capitalist rationality

This brings us to the second productive affinity of Bonefeld’s and Milios’s recent work: both align phenomena thatFoucauldian analyses of neoliberalism separate from capitalism with their form-analytic interpretations of the strongneoliberal state. They are thus able to conceive of neoliberal rationality as a political rationality of capital. Bonefeld’swork on ordoliberalism81 holds that ordoliberal theory not only exemplifies policies such as the Camerongovernment’s handling of the 2008 crisis, but that it also captures the “economic rationality of capitalist socialrelations” manifesting the “theology of capitalism.”82

The key is the emphasis on extending political rule into purportedly private arenas, in order to perpetuate thereproduction of the capital relation. For Bonefeld, “ordoliberal social policy is thus not only a policy towards and ofsociety. It is fundamentally a policy in and through society, governing its mentality from within.”83 Consequently, thestrong ordoliberal state “restrains competition and secures the social and ideological preconditions of economicliberty” by developing “the technique of liberal governance as a means of ‘market police.’”84

In Bonefeld’s view, such a technique consists in the moralizing social policy of “vital politics” ( Vitalpolitik), which actsa “market-facilitating and -embedding policy, which has to be pursued relentlessly to sustain and maintain the moralsentiments of economic liberty in the face of the destructive sociological and moral effects of free economy.”85 Vitalpolitics thus acts as a “market police” by instrumentalizing social policy in order to “eliminate the proletariat by meansof a ‘market-conforming’ social policy,” which facilitates “freedom and responsibility” in a way that transforms“recalcitrant workers into willing entrepreneurs of their own labour power.”86 Ultimately, this “social element of themarket economy… connects market freedom with individual responsibility, sets out to reconcile workers with the lawof private property, promotes enterprise, and delivers society from proletarianised social structures.”87 In this way,the social policy of vital politics exemplifies the extended political practice of the strong neoliberal state,complementing its coercive use of legal and political policy. Neoliberal rationality is thus the political rationality ofcapital.

Milios’s account of financialization aims at a parallel explanation. For Milios, financialization does not representprivatization or the rolling back of the state, but an incorporation of “a range of institutions, procedures, reflections,and strategies that make possible the accomplishment (not without contradictions) of fundamental targets in thecontext of existing social relations.”88 Moreover, in contrast to narratives that interpret financialization as adesperate attempt to forestall the erosion of capital in response to the falling rate of profit, Milios argues that itrepresents a “strong and deeply established capitalism.”89 This is because Milios controversially contends thatfinancialization is a sui generis form of fictitious capital which produces value, on the basis of his monetaryinterpretation of Marx’s theory of value.90 He also argues that financialization represents the main instance of therecomposition of the state’s form-determined role. The state embeds itself in this technology of power, whichfacilitates the market by reproducing the power relations of capitalist society.

For Milios, financial markets thus “have the dual function of assessing and effectively organizing individual economicactors and at the same time promoting a particular form of financing.”91 In so doing, they “monitor and control theterms and reproduction trajectories of the contemporary capitalist relation.”92 His analysis of financialization thusrepurposes Foucault’s notions of neoliberal governmentality and biopolitics, in a way that mirrors Bonefeld’s analysisof vital politics – providing an explanation of how financialization serves political ends by consisting in a type ofrationality that governs individual behaviour, compelling individuals to act in an entrepreneurial manner that assures

the reproduction of the capital relation.93

Milios links these Foucauldian concepts to financialization primarily through an account of the normalization of risk. Inhis view, not only has risk become a commodified component of neoliberal valorization, as a result of the compositionof neoliberal capitalism, but by virtue of these very same factors, it is utilized as a governmental technology of powerto assure the reproduction of capital on the world market:

Attaching a risk profile to an agent (a capitalist firm, a state, or a wage earner etc.) means accessingand measuring their ability to conform in a docile manner to roles within a complex world that isunderwritten by power relations. Risk calculation involves systemic evaluation on the part of everymarket participant of the efficiency with which particular targets (norms), as defined by social powerrelations, have been achieved. Every market participant lives risk as their reality and becomes caughtup in a perpetual effort to improve their profile as a competent risk-taker, in this sense conforming towhat is required by the “laws” of capitalism.94

This is particularly the case for workers who have been left most vulnerable by the composition of neoliberalism, withtheir “households… more reliant on risk management for their social reproduction.” Here, in what Milios describes asthe “most important moment of financial innovation as a social process,” risk management “shapes and disciplinessocial behavior under the norms of capital,” making labor “hostage to its own fortune, that is to say, hostage to thedemands of capital.”95 Financialization is thus representative of the recomposition of the state, rather than its retreat.As an instance of neoliberal rationality it serves the political purpose of reproducing neoliberal capitalism.

Conclusion

Since the capitalist state is a strong state, and the neoliberal state is a capitalist state, the neoliberal state is a strongstate that has used its form-determined political capacities in an instrumental manner for the purpose of instituting theneoliberal regime of surplus value extraction, in order to guarantee the perpetuation of the capital relation. Ratherthan the erosion of the state, it is these state capacities that drove the neoliberalization of society, and haveperpetuated it in its strengthened and recomposed form – in which even financialization is a form of governmentality.The neoliberal state exemplifies Marx’s account of the political purpose of the capitalist state, and the ordoliberalsocial policy of vital politics is paradigmatic of capitalist political rationality.

Taken together, these accounts align neoliberal rationality with the social rationality of capital. By conceiving of theneoliberal state as a strong capitalist state, they provide a basis for understanding how such a strong state, and its“biopolitical” social policies, serve the political purpose of assuring capitalist reproduction. These perspectives couldbe further strengthened by drawing on theoretical insights discussed above. For instance, the World Market Debatecould prove helpful in understanding how the development of neoliberalism was driven by a plurality of states in thecontext of deindustrialization and restructuring on the world market.96 The empirical accounts of reactions toprevious crises in neoliberalism, by Clarke and other members of the CSE, could also contribute to understandinghow the strong neoliberal state responds to crises.97 Finally, Agnoli’s theory of statification, in tandem with Bonefeld’stheory of vital-political social management, could illuminate the steps taken by states that contained the counter-hegemonic movements that emerged after 2008. Further developing this account of the form-determined instrumentof the capitalist state will be essential in generating theories that can grasp its overcoming.