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Global Capital National State and The in PDF
Global Capital National State and The in PDF
Werner Bonefeld
To cite this article: Werner Bonefeld (2008) Global Capital, National State, and the
International, Critique, 36:1, 63-72, DOI: 10.1080/03017600801892854
The article revisits the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) debate on the national
state and the global economy, and concludes with an appeal to internationalism. Its
purpose is to introduce this debate to a new readership. Contemporary analyses of
globalisation and the state tackle issues that were of key importance to this debate*yet
the specific critical insights that the CSE debate brought to the fore are lost in a world in
which ideology is in the process of producing itself. The article argues that regardless of
fashion, these insights are as relevant now as they were then.
Preface
The following quotations focus well the content and direction of the argument that
I wish to make:
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it
appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every
means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why?
Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence; too much
industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no
longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on
the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they
are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into
the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The
conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by
them. And how does bourgeois society get over these crises? On the one hand by
enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest
of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.2
1
The article is based on a talk given at the CSE 2006 conference. Originally a set of notes to guide the
presentation, the written version retains its original character but the more obvious jumps and leaps have been
ironed out, and historical references omitted. I am grateful to participants for their comments.
2
K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 1997) pp. 1819.
Although the state is constituted politically on a national basis, its class character is
not defined in national terms, the capitalist law of property and contract
transcending national legal systems, and world money transcending national
currencies.
Above all, the state remains an explicitly capitalist state, not a neutral agency
standing outside of class conflict, and even sophisticated left strategies of working
‘in and against the state’ . . . had little chance of success.3
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The Global Economy and the State in the Context of the CSE
In the face of the failure of the Russian Revolution and against the background of
1968, both of Prague and Paris, critical re-assessments of the purpose, role and
function of the state started again in the late 1960s. These reassessments crystallised
first in the critique of orthodox communist ‘stamocap’ theory and drew on themes of
class struggle and social praxis developed earlier by, amongst others, Antonio
Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch. Within the context of the CSE, and drawing
on Peter Burnham, Simon Clarke and Hugo Radice, Marx’s critique of the capitalist
state was well summed up by the ‘old chestnut’ of the state as ‘the executive
committee of the bourgeoisie’. That is to say, the purpose of capital is to make profit,
and the state is the political form of this purpose. Instead of ‘bringing the state back
in’, the CSE argued that the class struggle had to be brought back in to allow for a
proper critical reassessment of the form of the state, its social constitution, role and
purpose.4
In the UK, critical re-examination led first to the Poulantzas/Miliband debate*in
essence, as Radice notes, the structure/agency debate transposed from mainstream
sociology. The CSE contribution to the state debate criticised approaches that
accepted the contingent nature of statesociety relations. For the CSE statesociety
relations were determined by the form of society, that is, capitalist social relations.
The Poulantzas/Miliband debate only touched the surface. Instead of the Marxian
conception of the social relations of production, the two protagonists were seen to
operate within the traditional confines of bourgeois social theory, according to which
3
S. Clarke, ‘The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form’, in W.
Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds), Open Marxism, Vol.1: Dialectics and History (London: Pluto Press,
1992) p. 136. H. Radice, ‘Globalization, Labour and Socialist Renewal’, Capital & Class, no. 75 (2001), pp. 113
126, cited at p. 118.
4
P. Burnham, ‘Marx, International Political Economy and Globalisation’, Capital & Class, no. 75 (2001),
pp. 103112. S. Clarke. ‘The State Debate’, in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1991).
H. Radice, ‘The Developmental State under Global Neo-Liberalism: Who is Doing What to Whom’, Paper
presented at Departmental Seminar, Department of Politics, University of York, March 2006.
Critique 65
form of bourgeois society. Instead of analyses that emphasise either state over
markets, or markets over state, it understood both*market and state*as forms of
capitalist social relations. This understanding reassessed the state according to themes
of class struggle and social praxis, recovering the critical dimension of the Manifesto’s
denunciation of the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. In terms of
the critique of political economy, the focus on capital as a social relationship
overcame, at least in its critical intension, the orthodox dichotomy between objective
structures and social action by arguing that theoretical mysteries find their rational
explanation in the understanding of human social praxis, however perverted this
praxis might be in the form of the object.
5
H. Radice, op. cit. S. Clarke, ‘Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas’s Theory of the State’, in S. Clarke (ed.),
The State Debate, op. cit. On the two social theories, see V. Vanberg, Die beiden Soziologien (Tübingen: Mohr,
1975).
6
This part draws on S. Clarke, ‘The State Debate . . .’, op. cit.
66 W. Bonefeld
put, internationalisation led to the retreat of social democratic state and favoured the
emergence of the neo-liberal state.
Robin Murray’s notion of the territorial non-coincides between state and economy
build on Kindelberger’s argument that the national state was ‘just about through as
an economic unit’.7 He, too, argued that the economy had internationalised, and
internationalisation compromised the economic capacity of the state. Internationa-
lisation was characterised by the world-wide operation and thus global reach and
influence, of what were then called transnational companies (TNCs).8 Research into
TNCs*not multinational corporations (MNCs), this term came later*developed
into a growth industry during the 1970s, and inspired the creation of a specialised
agency, the Commission of Trans-national Corporations to look into matters of law,
regulation, and taxation.9 To sum up, the apparent internationalisation of capital led
Murray to pose the question whether national states will continue to be the primary
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7
C. Kindelberger, American Business Abroad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 207.
8
Compared with A. E. Berle, The 20th Century’s Capitalist Revolution (New York: Brace, 1954),
Kindelberger’s view was neither original nor ‘radical’ in its conclusions. Berle’s study suggested that
government should be run by private firms since they are bigger than government, and have at their disposal
greater resources in the form of a skilled, experienced and therefore efficient and effective ‘service-providers’ who
know that time is money. On Berle, see J. Agnoli, ‘The Market, the State, and the End of History’, in W. Bonefeld
and K. Psychopedis (eds) The Politics of Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).
9
Kees van der Pijl’s influential research into transnational class relations captured these developments in
theoretical terms. See K. van der Pijl, ‘Class Formation at the International Level’, Capital & Class, no. 9 (1979),
pp. 121.
10
On this see P. Murray, as cited in S. Picciotto, ‘The Internationalisation of Capital and the International
State System’, in S. Clarke (ed) The State Debate, op. cit., p. 214.
11
Cf. D. Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge:
Polity, 2004), and D. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
Critique 67
fundamentally flawed. First, it was based on the assumption that state and capital are
two distinct forms of social organisation, one of which determines the other. In this
view, the ‘deterritorialisation’ of capital entails the subordination of the state to
capitalist interests, to the detriment of the state’s ‘relative’ autonomy vis-à-vis the
economic*it seems as if internationalisation made the state fully capitalist. Then
there is, second, the assumption that prior to internationalisation, capital really was a
national thing, under the wings of the national state and subject to democratic forms
of accountability and regulation. That is to say, prior to internationalisation the state
appears to have been more than just a capitalist state. Internationalisation of capital is
thus treated as a break in the history of capitalism, from a national, state-centred
capitalist formation to an international capitalism, in which the state, in the words of
Robert Cox, transformed from an agency primarily concerned with the provision of
welfare into a transmission belt, and thus a mere instrument, of global capitalist
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12
R. Cox, ‘Global Perestroika’, in R. Miliband and L. Panitch (eds) The Socialist Register: New World Order?
(London: Merlin Press, 1992). For critique, see P. Burnham, ‘Globalization, Depoliticization and ‘‘Modern’’
Economic Management’, in W. Bonefeld and K. Psychopedis (eds) The Politics of Change, op. cit. See also the
debate in A. Bieler et al., Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour (London: Palgrave, 2006).
13
J. Hirsch, Kapitalismus ohne Alternative (Hamburg: VSA, 1989), p. 92, emphasis added.
14
More recently, mercantilist visions of a world of trading states have reasserted themselves in the face of the
apparent revival of states as the primary agents in world politics, be it in the form of US imperialism, China’s
‘state-based’ search for raw materials as a challenge to market-based globalization, or the apparent failure of a
supranational EU. The pendulum continues to swing from market to state and from state to market. Just like
Say’s law, where demand explains supply, and conversely, supply explains demand, the argument moves in
circles. The state points to the market, and the market points to the state, none is explained.
68 W. Bonefeld
the international state system’.15 Picciotto argued that the emergence of the national
state ‘originated as an international system of states’16*a ‘system’ of inter-state
relations that, as Marx had argued, is founded on: ‘the international relations of
production. International division of labour. International exchange and import.
Rate of exchange’.17 Furthermore, this inter-state system was, from its inception,
embedded within the ‘global context of production and exchange’. In other words, the
‘world market is integrated into the national economy’.18 In short, the CSE
approached state and economy as distinct forms of the same fundamental relations
of production, and argued that the world market subsists, from its inception, in and
through the territory of states.19
15
S. Clarke, Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State (Aldershot: Edward and Elgar, 1988),
pp. 143, 178, 179.
16
S. Picciotto, op. cit., p. 218.
17
K. Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 108.
18
C. von Braunmühl, ‘On the Analysis of the Capitalist Nation State within the World Market Context’, in J.
Holloway and S. Picciotto (eds) State and Capital (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), pp. 163, 168.
19
For recent elaborations, see P. Burnham, ‘Capital, Crisis and the International State System’, and J.
Holloway, ‘Global Capital and the National State’, both in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds) Global Capital,
National State and the Politics of Money (London: Palgrave, 1996). See also W. Bonefeld, ‘The Spectre of
Globalisation’, in W. Bonefeld and K. Psychopedis, op. cit.
20
H. Radice, ‘Globalization, Labour . . .’, op. cit., p. 118.
21
S. Clarke, ‘The State Debate’, op. cit.
22
B. Warren, cited in S. Picciotto, op. cit., pp. 214215.
23
A. Mitchell, Competitive Socialism (London: Unwin, 1989), p. 61.
Critique 69
power, is taken to mean that the struggle for state power is paramount in order to
combat neo-liberal capitalism. According to this view, the so-called decline in
the power of the national state has been exaggerated to favour specific class interests.
The state operates forcefully to advance these interests and, since its power is
undiminished, it remains the pre-eminent instrument for social change. As Leo
Panitch sees it, rather than leaving the state to operate as an efficient agency
for capitalist globalization, the left needs to struggle for the state in an attempt
to transform it into a creative agency of cooperation, decommodification and
democratization.24 It really is unfortunate that political analyses and demands
for socialist transformation remain typically ‘national’ in their focus. It is equally
unfortunate that many broadly progressive writers downplay the significance of
globalisation in favour of a political strategy that Radice has rightly labelled as
‘progressive nationalism’.25 The espousal of the national state as an instrument
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of socialist transformation abstracts from the form of the state and instead suggests
that the capitalist state is neo-liberal because the balance of class forces in favour of
‘neo-liberal’ globalisation defines it as such.
One of the most consistent socialist critics of neo-liberal globalisation has been Leo
Panitch. He urges the Left to ‘reorient strategic discussions . . . towards the
transformation of the state’, to achieve ‘a radical redistribution of productive
resources, income and working time’. For this to occur, a change in the balance of
class forces is essential. Furthermore, the ‘social-democratic transformation of the
state’ requires a ‘shift towards a more inwardly oriented economy’.26 He envisages a
form of economic development that combines national protectionism with economic
planning and redistribution of wealth from capital to labour. His socialist version of a
national economy appears persuasive*yet appearances are often deceptive and on
closer inspection tend to reveal themselves as myth.27
To his credit, Leo Panitch is at least clear about the desired outcome of his state-
centred anti-globalisation demands. In the work of, say, Hirst and Thompson, and
Linda Weiss, labour is conspicuous by its absence. According to Weiss, state capacity
remains vital for economic modernisation, and central to its success. National
competitiveness is seen to be dependent on the state either in the form of, for
example, the neo-liberal state of Anglo-Saxon capitalism or the corporatist state of
Rhineland capitalism. Hirst and Thompson envisage a supranationally anchored and
coordinated national modernisation strategy that combats neo-liberal globalisation in
favour of a politically controlled and democratically balanced modernisation of
economic relations. These authors thus agree with Hirsch that globalisation has
24
L. Panitch, ‘ ‘‘The State in a Changing World’’: Social-Democratizing Global Capitalism?’, Monthly Review,
50:5 (1998).
25
H. Radice, ‘Responses to Globalization: A Critique of Progressive Nationalism’, New Political Economy, 5:1
(2000), pp. 519.
26
L. Panitch, ‘Globalisation and the State’, in L. Panitch and R. Miliband (eds) The Socialist Register (London:
Merlin Press, 1994), pp. 87, 89. L. Panitch, ‘The New Imperial State’, New Left Review, no. 2 (MarchApril 2000),
pp. 520.
27
See H. Radice, ‘The National Economy: A Keynesian Myth?’, Capital & Class, no. 22 (1984), pp. 111140.
70 W. Bonefeld
forced the state to become a ‘competition state’*itself a highly dubious concept since
it suggests that capitalist states’ primary occupation in the past was not to ensure
economic competitiveness.28 Weiss argues for a differential approach: in order to
retain competitiveness, different states adopt distinct modernisation strategies,
depending on their respective socio-economic structures of development; Hirst and
Thompson argue that modernisation cannot be to the self-destructive forces of the
market but needs to be regulated by the good offices of the state to secure its viability
and democratic legitimacy; and Panitch argues for the ‘social-democratisation of
capitalism’ by means of a change in the balance of class forces. He does not conceive
of the state as the political form of capitalist social relations but sees it as an objective
field of tension between distinct social interests, and it is the struggle between these
interests that decides state purpose. That is, the state is conceived as a sort of political
opportunity structure that social interests struggle to define to advance their specific
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28
L. Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). D. Hirst and G. Thompson,
Globalisation . . ., op. cit. J. Hirsch, ‘Globalisation of Capital, Nation-States and Democracy’, Studies in Political
Economy, no. 54 (1997), pp. 3958.
29
S. Clarke, ‘The State Debate . . .’, op. cit, pp. 34.
Critique 71
capitalist class, while preventing the working class from using its collective power to
assert the right to the product of its labour’.30 In sum, the purpose of the form of the
state is entailed in its bourgeois character, that is, to ‘govern over the labour force’.31
The old chestnut of the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie sums this
up well.
Conclusion
My conclusion is in the form of an appeal to internationalism. The attempt to hold
the international division of labour down to the national division of labour is most
dangerous and disarms the Left. This conception of socialism as a national affair
‘reflects one of the most powerful legacies of the twentieth-century political and
economic thinking: the theory of ‘‘socialism in one country’’’.32 The last century has
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taught us many lessons. Chief among them is that socialism can only mean
internationalism. The national division of labour presupposes the international
division of labour and national protectionism amounts to a defence within, not
against, the world market. Capitalist social relations are always already world market
relations.
The realities of globalisation should not be attacked as an ideology that masks the
enduring capacity of the state to reform or transform capitalism. Nor should the
world market society of capital be seen as an ‘inter-national’ economic order in which
the rich countries exploit the poor countries. Neo-mercantilist imperialism is indeed
a real force in the expansion of capitalist reproduction through dispossession
supported by means of military direction. Then as now, Marx’s insight that ‘a great
deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without certificate of birth,
was yesterday, in England, the capitalized blood of children’, remains a powerful
judgment of contemporary conditions.33 That is to say, neo-imperialism cannot be
understood in abstraction from global capitalist class relations. It is, of course,
politically easy for a ‘peripheral’ bourgeoisie to ‘suppress internal revolt by blaming
the continuation of imperialist forms of domination of their countries’, and in doing
so to masks ‘their own complicity in this domination’.34 There is thus need for a
realistic conception of the struggle for human emancipation, a conception that does
not succumb to the imagery of the form of the state as a potential force of national
liberation against the exigencies of global capitalist interests, and that, instead,
rediscovers class struggle as a laboratory of the communist individual.35
30
S. Clarke, ‘State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital’, in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate, op.
cit, p. 198.
31
J. Hirsch, op. cit., p. 47.
32
H. Radice, ‘Globalization . . .’, op. cit., p. 113.
33
K. Marx, Capital, vol. I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 707.
34
A. Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Post-Colonial World (London: Palgrave, 1997), p. 49.
35
On this, see W. Bonefeld, ‘The Capitalist State: Illusion and Critique’, in W. Bonefeld (ed.) Revolutionary
Writing (New York: Autonomedia, 2003).
72 W. Bonefeld
We must therefore not only ‘attain to a conception of history that is in keeping
with [the] insight’ that ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘‘state of
emergency’’ in which we live, is not the exception but the rule’.36 We must also
develop a conception of struggle that understands that the ‘everyday struggle over the
production and appropriation of surplus value in every individual workplace and
every local community . . . is the basis of the class struggle on a global scale’.37 Cutting
struggle down to the national level as the basic, given unit of the inter-national order
coerces the global character of this struggle, divides it in the form of competing
territorial units, and thus treats them as competing factors of production that can
also be called upon as a military resource. Proletarian internationalism is the only
answer to (neo-)liberalism, especially against the background of its political crisis.
Paraphrasing Simon Clarke one more time, if the prospect of dictatorship, populist
nationalism and war seems unlikely now, it seemed equally unlikely some 100 years
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Postscript
The critique of neo-liberalism is necessary. However, this critique should not be
reduced to a critique in favour of the national state as an instrument of democratic
renewal against neo-liberalism.38 The capitalist state, however nationally maintained,
transnationalised, or ‘spaced out’, is fundamentally a liberal state.39 That is to say, the
critique of the world market society of capital has also to be a critique of its political
form. In short, all who live from their labour and the sale of their labour power ‘find
themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which
society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State; in
order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State’.40
The communist individual is not something that can be decreed by the force of law,
the state. The form of the state presupposes the separation of the mass of the
population from the means of production. This separation is the social basis on
which capital and its political form, the state, rests. A society where the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all, cannot rest on
this separation. It is this separation that renders human productive power a
commodity, and it this separation that the communist individual subverts in her
struggle for a human world.
36
W. Benjamin, ‘Geschichtsphilosphische Thesen’ in Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsätze (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1965), p. 84.
37
S. Clarke, ‘Class Struggle and the Global Overaccumulation of Capital’, in R. Albritton et al. (eds), Phases of
Capitalist Development, (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 9091.
38
On this see W. Bonefeld, ‘Anti-Globalization and the Question of Socialism’, Critique, 34:1 (2006),
pp. 3959, and W. Bonefeld, ‘Die Zeit der Transformation’, AK Zeitung (Berlin/Hamburg), no. 515, 16 March
2007, p. 31.
39
Cf. N. Brenner, New State Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
40
K. Marx and F. Engels, Die deutsche Ideology, MEW 3 (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), p. 77.