THE STATE DEBATE Capital and Class General Editor: Simon Qarke The Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) was founded in 1969 to provide a non-sectarian and internationalist forum for Marxist theoretical debate. Much of the most fertile intellectual work on the left over the last two decades has had its origins in the working groups and annual conference of the CSE, and has first been published in CSE'sjoumal Capital and Class. This series makes these fundamental debates available to a wider readership, by bringing together published and unpublished papers with an editorial introduction, in order to inform the renewal of socialist thinking in the 19908. Werner Bonefeld and John Holloway (editors) POST-FORDISM AND SOCIAL FORM Simon Clarke (editor) THE STATE DEBATE Andy Friedman (editor) THE LABOUR PROCESS Sue Himmelweit (editor) GENDER Simon Mohun (editor) VALUE THEORY Hugo Radice (editor) THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF CAPITAL The State Debate Edited by Simon Clarke Senior Lecturer in Sociology University ofW arwick M MACMILLAN C The Conference of Socialist Economists 1991 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or ttansmitted save with written permission or in accordanc:e with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the tenns of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Uc:ensinJ Agew:y. 33.4 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relaIion to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. FIrSt published 1991 Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LID HoundmiIls. Basinptoke. Hampshire R021 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Ubrary Cataloguing in Publication Data The State debate - (Capital and class) 1. State I. Clarke. Simon U. Series. 320.1 ISBN 978-0-333-54859-2 ISBN 978-1-349-21464-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21464-8 Contents 1 The State Debate Simon Clarke 1 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Problem of the Capitalist State . . . 3 The Gennan Debate . . . . . . . 5 Poulantzas's Theory of the State .... 16 The State Debate in the CSE . . . . . . 22 New Directions in the Theory of the State . . . . 32 Structure and Struggle in the Theory of the State 44 Global Capital and the Nation State ....... 53 Class Struggle, New Social Movements and the Welfare State 57 Beyond the Fragments: the Recomposition of Class . . . . 67 2 Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas's Theory of the State Simon Clarke 70 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 The 'Neo-Gramscian~ Critique of the Theory of State Monopoly Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 Marx's Concept of Production and the Critique of Political Economy .................. 74 The Law of Value and the Critique of Bourgeois Ideology 79 Poulantzas's Theory of Social Structure .... 86 Poulantzas's Theory of Class . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Poulantzas 's Theory of the Capitalist State . . . . . . . . . 96 The Political Implications of Poulantzas' s Theory . . . . . 100 Poulantzas 's Later Revisions .............. 103 Conclusion - Poulantzas and the Crisis of Sociology. . . 106 3 Capital, Crisis and the State John Holloway and Sol Picciotto 109 Capital and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 The Development of the Fonn and Functions of the State 122 v vi Contents 4 The Fordist Security State and New Social Movements Joachim Hirsch 142 5 Accumulation Strategies, State Forms and Hegemonic Projects Bob Jessop 157 The Capital Relation and the Value Form . . . . . . . . . 157 Some Implications of the Concept of 'Accumulation Strategy' 164 On the Form of the State .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Some Implications of the Concept of 'Hegemonic Project' 175 Concluding Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180 6 State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital Simon Clarke 183 The Problem of the State .... . . . . . . . . . . . . 184 The Autonomy of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 The Necessity of the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 The Reproduction of Capital and the Class Struggle. . . . 189 The Reproduction of Capital, Class Struggle, and the State 193 The Working Class and the State . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Conclusion: The Capitalist State, the Class Struggle, and Socialism . . . . . . . . _ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 7 A Note on the Theory of Capitalist States Colin Barker 204 8 The Internationalisation of Capital and the International State System Sol Picciotto 214 State Sovereignty and Jurisdiction ............ . 216 Historical Development of the International State System . 218 New International State Forms .............. . 221 9 The State and Everyday Struggle John Holloway 225 Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 The State as a Form of Social Relations . . . . . . . . . 227 Fetishism and Fetishisation . 236 The State as Form-process . . 240 Some Conclusions . . . . . . 250 Bibliography 260 Acknowledgements 'Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas's Theory of the State' and 'Cap ital, Crisis and the State' were first published in Capital and Class, 2, 1977. 'A Note on the Theory of Capitalist States' was first published in Capital and Class, 4, 1978. 'The Fordist Security State and New Social Movements', 'Accumu lation Strategies, State Forms and Hegemonic Projects', and 'State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital' were all first pub lished in Kapitalistate, San Francisco, 10/11, 1983. A substantially revised version of 'Accumulation Strategies, State Forms and Hege monic Projects' appears in Bob Jessop: State Theory, Polity Press, 1990. 'The Internationalisation of Capital and the International State System' was first published in CSE Conference Papers, 1985. 'The State and Everyday Struggle' has been published in Spanish in Cuadernos Politicos, Mexico, 24, 1980. Contributors Colin Barker teaches Sociology at Manchester Polytechnic. Simon Clarke teaches Sociology at the University of Warwick. Joachim Hirsch teaches Sociology at the J.W. Goethe University of Frankfurt. John Holloway teaches Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Bob Jessop teaches Sociology at the University of Lancaster. Sol Picciotto teaches Law at the University of Warwick. vii 1 The State Debate Simon Clarke Introduction The core papers in this collection present a particular approach to the capitalist state which was developed during the 1970s in working groups of the Conference of Socialist Economists ( CSE). Although these papers built on collective discussion, they by no means expressed a consensus within the CSE, or even within the relevant working groups. The justification for their selection is not that they are representative of work within the CSE, but that they express a distinctive theoretical approach to the state.1 Although the CSE was originally established in 1969 as a forum for economists, its debates soon moved beyond narrowly economic concerns in the attempt to locate economic developments as one aspect of the development of the capitalist system as a whole. There was no way in which economic issues could be isolated from political questions in the atmosphere of growing economic crisis and sharpening political and ideological conflict through the 1970s. It was increasingly clear that the future course of economic and social development of capitalist society was not a matter of the unfolding of economic laws, whether Marxist or neo-classical, but would be determined as the outcome of social and political struggles. On the other hand, it was equally clear that the outcome of such struggles would not be determined merely by the will and determination of the forces lThe papers by Colin ~arker, Joachim Hirsch and Bob Jessop provide a flavour of other sides of this debate. However, I make no apologies for the balance of the collection, or for the partisanship of this introduction! I am grateful to those who commented on earlier drafts of this introduction (particularly John Holloway, Werner Bonefeld, Sol Picciotto, Andrea Wittkowsky and Joachim Hirsch), to members of Warwick CSE and Coventry CSE Local State Groups for discussion of the issues raised, and, above all, to the many comrades who have participated in the state debate over the past fifteen years, to whom all credit and all responsibility is due. 1 2 Simon Clarke in play, but would also be circumscribed by the economic, political and ideological framework within which they were fought out. The renewal of the class struggle from the late 1960s brought to the fore the theoretical questions of the relationship between 'economics' and 'politics', between 'structure' and 'struggle' in understanding the role of the capitalist state. The distinctiveness of the papers in this volume lies in their attempt to develop an approach to the state centred on the determining role of the class struggle, against the structural-functionalist orthodoxy which prevailed in the early 1970s, and which has come to the fore again in the 1980s. In Britain this structural-functionalism was associated in the 1970s primarily with the work of Poulantzas, and in the 1980s with that of Habermas and Offe, on the one hand, and the French Regulation School, on the other. However the most sophisticated development of this approach is to be found in the work of Joachim Hirsch, who has drawn on all these sources while attempting to set the theory of the state on Marxist foundations. The German state debate, and the early work of Hirsch, pro vided one of the sources for the papers which make up this volume. However these papers took up the German work on the state within the particular British context of a deepening economic crisis and intensifying economic and political struggle. In this context the 'structural-functionalist' tendencies of the French and German con tributions appeared inadequate in down-playing the role of the class struggle. On the other hand, the more sophisticated British economic analyses of the crisis and the class struggle paid insufficient attention to the specificity of the state and of political struggle. The debates through which the papers reproduced here emerged sought to integrate the lessons of the French and German state debates with the insights of the British analyses of the crisis. The justification for reprinting these papers is not an antiquarian concern to exhume the past. It is rather that the theoretical issues raised in the debate were never finally resolved, primarily because changing political circumstances dictated a shift in theoretical emphasis, the apparent stabilisation of capitalism after the recession of 1979-81 underlying the renewal of structural-functionalism and systems theory, and the marginalisation of class analysis. As the crisis-tendencies of capitalism reappear, and as class conflict rears its head anew, the temporary character of this stabilisation becomes increasingly clear, undermining the plausibility of the dominant integrationist theories and