Sunday, August 18, 2024

Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New Debate




Rob Hunter, Rafael Khachaturian and Eva Nanopoulos (eds)
Palgrave MacMillan, Cham, Switzerland, 2023. 279 pp., $129.99 hb
ISBN 9783031361661

Reviewed by Tony Smith

About the reviewer
Tony Smith is Professor of Philosophy and Political Science (emeritus) at Iowa State Universi



Marx’s presented his critique of political economy as a systematic ordering of the essential determinations of the capitalist mode of production. The first part of the original project, a ‘Book on Capital’, eventually became the three volumes of Capital we know today. The projected ‘Book on the State’ remained unwritten, although valuable clues to its content are scattered in Marx’s drafts and publications. Marx also critically assessed concrete state forms and activities in his political essays and newspaper articles.

Subsequent Marxian state theorists have attempted to interpret, revise or extend Marx’s legacy in their writings. Marxism and the Capitalist State ranks with the best of these works, clearly illustrating the great strengths of Marxian critique compared to mainstream and non-Marxian heterodox state theories. Main themes include: 1) Marx’s own perspective on the capitalist state, 2) the contributions made by subsequent theorists, 3) distinguishing features of contemporary states and 4) the implications of Marxian state theory for political practice, each outlined below.

In their introductory overview (‘Reopening the State Debate’), the editors provide an extremely helpful summary of Marx’s writings on the state. Important details of Marx’s position are examined in the other contributions. The authors in this collection broadly agree on the content of his crucial claims and on their continuing validity.

Firstly, the capitalist state is not merely a variant of a transhistorical form of political organization existing for millennia. As Rob Hunter expresses forcefully, the state form today must be comprehended in its historically specificity as a capitalist state (‘The Capitalist State as a Historically Specific Social Form’).

Additionally, the capitalist state, however, is not an instrument used by capitalists to further their interests. The owners and controllers of capital are in a ceaseless competitive war preventing any of them from being able to establish and maintain the general preconditions for the reproduction of capitalist society (Nate Holdren, ‘Social Murder: Capitalism’s Systematic and State-Organized Killing’, 190; Michael McCarthy, ‘Beyond Abstractionism: Notes on Conjunctural State Theory’, 217). The reproduction of capitalist society, then, requires an institutional agency not limited by the particular interests of particular capitalists. It requires a capitalist state. This does not mean that the capitalist state is ‘neutral’, capable of furthering any social end equally well. It is not merely a state in capitalist society. It is the state of capitalist society, an essential point emphasized throughout the book. More precisely, it is the ‘political’ form taken by the social relations defining capitalist society.

Capitalist production and exchange is a profit-driven system, devoted to the transformation (valorisation) of money value (M) initially invested in the production of commodities (C) into a return of greater monetary value (M′) from their sale, with M′ forming the basis for a new M, and so on without limit. ‘Capital’ refers to this valorisation process M-C-M′ as a whole, maintaining its identity from one completed circuit to the next. Since society as a whole is subjected to the impersonal valorisation imperative (‘M must become M′!’), we can speak of capital’s impersonal domination of society, with capital’s end, valorisation, having systematic priority over human ends (Chris O’Kane, ‘The Marx Revival and State Theory: Towards a Negative-Dialectical Critical Social Theory of the State’, 241).

Marx explains the valorisation process in terms of the difference between the monetary value workers receive (the wage) for selling their labour power for a period of time to those who own and control investment capital, on the one hand, and the monetary value the collective workforce creates during that period, on the other. This makes capitalism, no less than feudalism or slavery, a system of class exploitation. (Jasmine Chorley-Schulz interestingly extends Marx’s discussion of the exploitation of living labour to an account of the class position of soldiers in ‘Soldiers and the State’. Just as the social relationship of exploitation results in the combined power of cooperating workers appearing in the fetish form of a power of capital, the combined power of soldiers appears in the alien form of a coercive power of the capitalist state (126-129).

The capitalist state must establish and maintain the general preconditions for the reproduction of both the impersonal domination of capital and class exploitation. Holdren draws out a profound implication: the capitalist state is complicit in what Engels termed ‘social murder’. Occupational injury and illness, famine, poverty, addiction, unsafe consumer products, public health shortcomings, ecological devastation and so on, are not accidental occurrences due simply to evil capitalists or negligent state officials. They are systematic in a social world where what is good for capital has priority over what is good for human beings. The stark but unavoidable conclusion is that ‘all versions of capitalism will tend to generate depoliticised mass killing of working-class people’ (186).

Finally, Marx’s theory of the state culminates in the thesis that no political reform or set of reforms can free a capitalist society from impersonal domination and class exploitation. A revolutionary rupture from capitalism – and the capitalist state – is required. (Hunter’s essay, a superb analysis of the implications of Marx’s theory of social forms for state theory, makes a truly compelling case for this conclusion.)

The introduction also offers a concise summary of the work of major Marxian state theorists since Marx’s day (7-11). Alyssa Battistoni presents a succinct summary of the views on the state of Marxian environmental theorists such as James O’Connor and John Bellamy Foster (‘State, Capital, Nature: State Theory for the Capitalocene’). Kristin Munro (‘Socially Reproductive Workers, ‘Life-Making’, and State Repression’) and Chris O’Kane forcefully reaffirm the main claims about the state in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, avoiding the notorious obscurity of Adorno’s own writing. Stephen Maher and Scott Aquanno (‘From Economic to Political Crisis: Trump and the Neoliberal State’) summarize the core of Poulantzas’ influential theory of the state. Michael McCarthy examines the evolution of Poulantzas thought in detail, arguing that his later work fails to escape from the functionalist perspective of early writings. Numerous authors explicitly acknowledge the influence of the immediately previous generation of Marxian theorists, highlighting especially the important contributions of Moise Postone, Simon Clarke and Werner Bonefeld.

The summaries provided in the collection are, of course, no substitute for reading the works summarized. But they do convey the intellectual richness of the Marxian tradition and are a helpful guide to further study.

Throughout the collection, a wide range of features of the contemporary capitalist state are considered. Alyssa Battistoni examines the contemporary capitalist state’s capability of responding to the environmental crises. Her typology of different Marxian positions on this issue greatly illuminates on-going debates and deserves to be widely known (41-44).

Rafael Khachaturian’s ‘Crisis, Social Reproduction, and the Capitalist State: Notes on an Uncertain Conjuncture’ explores state policies in the response to the Covid pandemic. Priority was quite obviously given to the restoration of capital accumulation over social care. Systematic bias in access to care on the basis of race, gender and geography was no less obvious. Khachaturian’s paper also explores the rise of ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’, a ‘crisis regime of permanent exception’, showing how the decreased importance of political parties and legislative bodies relative to bureaucratic administration and executive powers erodes the state’s legitimacy (86).

Maher and Aquanno examine a particular case of bureaucratic administration in ‘From Economic to Political Crisis: Trump and the Neoliberal State’. They describe how the U.S. Federal Reserve is both integrated with the capitalist economy and insulated from democratic pressures. The Fed proved to be insulated from executive state power as well as when the Trump administration proved unable to assert presidential authority over it. Another theme of this chapter is how the increasing power of the financial sector and Central Banks is not in tension with industrial capital, pace the view of many heterodox economists. The allocations of the financial sector have intensified disciplinary power over the working class to the benefit of industrial capital. (This theme is developed further in their important recent book, The Fall and Rise of American Finance).

The actions by the Fed and other Central Banks in response to the Great Financial Crisis and the Covid pandemic are instances of the ‘war-emergency paradigm’ examined in Eva Nanopoulos’ essay (‘To Embrace or To Reject: Marxism and the “War-Emergency Paradigm”’). She argues that the war-emergency paradigm is ‘a prevalent, if not the de facto, mode of governing of the capitalist state’, even if financial crises and epidemics make it also ‘an expression of our current age of capitalist catastrophe’ (159).

In ‘“Bursting Asunder the Integument”: Democracy, Digitalization, and the State’, Dimitrios Kivotidis discusses how the digital revolution has enhanced the reactionary powers of the bourgeois state to monitor citizens and manipulate public opinion. He argues convincingly that targeted advertising, misinformation and digital echo chambers all contribute to the political disorganization of workers by promoting a ‘fragmented, empiricist understanding of social and political phenomena […] incompatible with the comprehensive and holistic viewpoint that is the prerequisite for a conscious critique of capitalism and pursuit of a radical alternative’ (63-64).

Kristin Munro’s essay (‘Socially Reproductive Workers, “Life-Making,” and State Repression’) considers the role of state workers in social services such as health care and education. She presents a powerful Marxian response to social reproduction theorists who fail to adequately appreciate how these services contribute to the reproduction of the capitalist economy.

As noted above, all authors in this collection accept the practical imperative to move to a new stage of world history where the impersonal domination of capital and the exploitation of the capital/wage labour relationship are overcome. All agree that this involves overcoming the capitalist state. Nonetheless, some affirm that it is possible, in the meantime, for progressive movements to successfully struggle for laws and public policies furthering the interests of workers, the poor, those facing environmental risks and so on, even if these laws and policies are bound to remain profoundly limited, distorted and subject to reversal in capitalism. The most vehement defence of this ‘class struggle’ perspective is presented by Michael McCarthy. He grants the strong tendency for the capitalist state to put the needs of capital accumulation before other concerns. He insists, however, that a tendency is not a certainty (224). Starting from Poultanzas’s description of the state as a strategic field, McCarthy argues for a greater scope of political contingencies than the functionalist residues of Poultanzas’s own state theory allow. Despite the limits of capitalist democracy, successful struggles within these political institutions can restructure power relations in society in ways that benefit workers and the oppressed (227). Khachaturian agrees: ‘It is quite likely that the state will play a role within the transition to any emancipatory political project (no matter how remote this possibility seems today)’ (94). Alyssa Battistoni similarly insists that the ‘urgency of climate change renders it imperative to engage with institutions as they presently exist’ (32).

In the contrasting ‘structuralist’ position, the salient fact is simply that the capitalist state is never not a manifestation of capitalist social relations. Apparently progressive state laws and policies that are adopted do not offer an escape from those social relations. Kivotidis, for example, writes that ‘the adverse effects of digital capitalism on social consciousness cannot be ameliorated within the confines of bourgeois institutions through regulation and “radical reforms”’ (54). If adverse effects cannot be ameliorated, social actions aiming at reforms have no point. O’Kane similarly asserts without qualification that ‘anti-capitalist political movements that enter the political sphere of capitalism are absorbed and depoliticized’ (245). If that is their inevitable fate, Marxists should not support them. While Munro acknowledges that the role of state workers in health care and education is contradictory, their primary role in her account is to ‘perpetuate the antagonism and social misery inherent to capitalism’ (178). Why should Marxists join political struggles to improve access to quality health care and education if it means perpetuating antagonism and misery? Praxis needs instead to be revolutionary, ‘smashing’, rather than working within, the capitalist state (Kivotidis 55, 69). If revolution is impossible in the given context, the only acceptable alternative is an unrelenting critique of capitalism as a negative totality and the capitalist state’s role in reproducing that totality.

Holdren’s essay reminds us that the questions at issue here were already posed in Capital. Nineteenth-century struggles in England to limit the length of the working day were successful. Did this reform benefit workers? Marx’s answer is ‘yes’ in many profound respects. Having the time to recover from work, nurture children, deepen other relationships, become informed about community issues and so on, is better than having to work 16-hour days! In other equally profound respects, however, the answer must be an emphatic ‘no’. After state legislation imposed limits on the production and appropriation of absolute surplus value from extensions of the working day, representatives of capital introduced new technologies and forms of labour organization enabling relative surplus value to be produced and appropriated. As a result, capital’s impersonal domination and the class exploitation of wage labour were renewed and reinforced. Those who see the capitalist state as a site of struggle can appeal to the former aspect of Marx’s writing, while adherents of the ‘structuralist’ position find ample textual support in the latter.

There is, I think, considerable truth on both sides. When workers struggle for higher wages and better working conditions, they remain within a capital/wage labour relationship of domination and exploitation. When these and other progressive struggles are successful to some degree, the illusion that the shortcomings of capitalism can be overcome in some new variant is likely to strengthen. What is not illusionary is capital’s amorphousness. In response to successful progressive reforms, it will mutate to pursue new opportunities for commodification, monetarisation and valorisation opened up by the reforms. As Holdren writes, ‘[a]cting within state institutional channels tends to encourage social struggles to express themselves in ways that do not disrupt the operation of the valorisation imperative, let alone threaten to end capitalism’ (203).

On the other hand, however, the revolutionary change called for opponents of ‘radical reformism’ requires a mass revolutionary consciousness that simply does not exist at present. Insisting on revolution nonetheless also ‘do[es] not disrupt the operation of the valorisation imperative, let alone threaten to end capitalism’. Hoping as O’Kane does that a sufficiently compelling negative dialectic will illuminate how ‘objective and subjective dimensions of negative totality rel[y] on each other’, and thereby ‘break “the spell” of identification and awaken a global subject that would negate negative totality’ also does not seem adequate (237). Why would even the most powerful account of how the objective structures of capital and the subjective dispositions of those trapped within them reinforce each other awaken a global subject dedicated to negate such an all-powerful negative totality? Wouldn’t a compelling description of being trapped in a closed totality foster accommodation, cynical opportunism, stoic resignation or despair? If pursuit of even the most radical reforms risks reinforcing the reign of capital, doesn’t renouncing progressive social movements in the name of a critique of negative totality run precisely the same risk?

In my view, the salient theoretical point here concerns the distinction between ‘totality’ and ‘totalizing’. A totality incorporates everything apparently ‘other’, reducing it to no more than a moment of itself. When Marx refers to capital as a ‘dominant subject’, this might suggest that he sees capital as a totality fully subjecting the social world to its imperatives (Commodify! Monetarize! Valorise!). This would make the development and mobilization of human capabilities either a form of capital (‘variable capital’) or a ‘free gift’ to capital. But this is only one component of Marx’s concept of capital. It is also the case that capital is a mere empty form, completely lacking powers of its own. What appear as the powers of capital are nothing but the collective creative powers of social individuals (and the mobilized powers of nature, science, our shared cultural heritage and so on) in an alien form:


In exchange for his labour capacity as a given magnitude [that is, a wage] he [the worker] surrenders its creative power, like Esau who gave up his birthright for a mess of pottage […] [T]he creative power of his labour establishes itself as the power of capital and confronts him as an alien power’ (Marx 1986: 233).

Capital’s immanent drive to be a totality is always frustrated by this dependence on ‘the creative power of labour’. From an ontological standpoint, then, capital cannot be the totality it wants to be, so to speak. It parasitically depends on an ‘other’ that is ‘inside’ it. Capital is an objective contradiction, at once an Absolute Power and an Absolute Nothing.

But while capital cannot be adequately conceptualized as a closed totality, it is very much a totalizing power, capable of forcing the surrender of workers’ creative powers. As Hunter notes, we know what compels this surrender: separation from the objective preconditions of human life, the means of production and means of subsistence (261, 268). This core theoretical claim of the critique of political economy has an important practical implication: challenges to this separation are at least implicitly challenges to capitalist society.

From this perspective, social movements struggling to direct investments in means of production towards social ends, to expand access to means of subsistence (in the broadest sense of the term, including education and health care) on the basis of social needs, and to create a social space to advocate for both can in principle be affirmed from a Marxian standpoint. Marx defended freedom of the press and freedom of assembly and representative bodies on these grounds, as Nanopoulos notes (153-4). Marx’s defence of child labour laws is worth quoting in this context:


They [the working class] know that, before everything else, the children and juvenile workers must be saved from the crushing effects of the present system. This can only be effected by converting social reason into social force, and, under given circumstances, there exists no other method of doing so, than through general laws, enforced by the power of the state. In enforcing such laws, the working class do not fortify governmental power. On the contrary, they transform that power, now used against them, into their own agency. They effect by a general act what they would vainly attempt by a multitude of isolated individual efforts. (Marx 1985: 189)

Other considerations support this conclusion. When collective struggles for reforms are successful, confidence in the collective power of people to change the social world may grow. When these successes prove limited and distorted, as they invariably will, new social movements aiming at less limited and less distorted results may arise. When those struggles fail or lead to only severely limited and distorted successes themselves, those engaged might conclude (correctly!) that the root problem lies with the property and production relationships of capitalism. In the right circumstances, a revolutionary political consciousness could possibly develop on the requisite mass scale.

There are, of course, no guarantees that will occur. Even worse, the pursuit of reforms may well foster the illusions of reformism and rejuvenate capital by opening up new paths of accumulation. Nonetheless, mass revolutionary consciousness is surely a necessary condition for radical social change. There are strong practical reasons for Marxists to be wary of theories of the state that in effect rule out the possibility of that condition being met by assuming from the start that capital’s power is all-encompassing. It is, I think, preferable to agree with Nanopoulos that pursing a specific political reform in a particular time and place is a pragmatic matter (152).

The editors honestly note that many important topics are not considered adequately in this collection, including race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and gender, the interstate system, migration and statelessness, constitutional democracy, alternative political forms taken by the capitalist state and violence and conflict in geopolitical relations (4). State funding of research and development that private capitals find too risky or too long-term to fund themselves can be added to this list, along with that state-bestowed intellectual property rights that enabling immense private profits to be appropriated on the basis of publicly funded R&D. But no single collection of essays should be expected to cover the full range of theoretical and practical issues regarding the capitalist state. What can be found in this book is more than enough to make it an immensely valuable contribution to Marxian theory. And more than enough to confirm Hunter’s assertion in the book’s final sentences:


The abolition of capitalism does not consist in the affirmation of fetishized conceptions of law or the state. Instead the abolition of capitalism is the creation of an alternative society – one in which collective decision-making, production validated through planning rather than exchange, and the freedom of each premised on the freedom of all will obtain in social forms wholly unlike those that presently constitute our misery (269-270).

24 June 2024

ReferencesKarl Marx 1985 Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 20 (New York: International Publishers).
Karl Marx 1986 Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy [Grundrisse] Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 28 (New York: International Publishers).


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21552_marxism-and-the-capitalist-state-towards-a-new-debate-by-rob-hunter-rafael-khachaturian-and-eva-nanopoulos-eds-reviewed-by-tony-smith/

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