aut-op-sy message, [AUT] re: questions

"Tahir: Well, there is the historical explanation, based on the
transition out of feudalism and the feudal state to capitalism and to
the capitalist state: The absolutist state arises as an alliance of
bourgeoisie and monarchy against the depredations of the lawless
aristocracy."

That's an explanation for the emergence of the modern state, as opposed to a theory of the state. I don't have a huge problem with it as an explanation, but I'm not sure what it has to do with states today (unless maybe they still contain feudal elements?). There's a little problem that "the state" is usually assumed to have pre-existed the absolutist state particularly, and another that the status of the bourgeoisie in pre-absolutist and absolutist Europe is tenuous (as to whether extraction of surpluses through wage-labour actually existed), but nothing really fatal for this explanation of the modern state.

"Tahir: Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that
society does predate capitalism. How exactly could it not?"

You're missing the point completely. My point was about the relationship between micro and macro levels, or in Hegelian Marxist language, between the "totality" (e.g. capitalism) and the "moments" (e.g. the state, the factory, mechanical reproduction, the prison, etc). A lot of Hegelian Marxists "derive" the "moments" (e.g. the state) from the "totality" (e.g. capitalism), when this doesn't make sense either in terms of analysis (capitalism does not exist "before" the "moments" analytically, it is an abstraction from them) or in terms of history (many of these so-called "moments" preceded capitalism). I have no idea if you adhere to the thesis I'm criticising here or not.

"Tahir: The sovereign does act like this sometimes; and the liberal
bourgeoisie, armed with Voltaire et al, is always fighting against that.
That goes on all the time; it is what one might call 'politics as
usual'. "

So you agree that the state is a "class" or "class-like force" or "social force", not a simple representative of the bourgeoisie or of society? It seems to me you're here agreeing with the point I was trying to make.

"The idea of the workers' state is a nonsense. It arises from
certain notions of the 'dictatorship or the proletariat', but
hypostatised into a state, rather than as a transition to
post-capitalist society."

Indeed. It seems you're agreeing with me again. I think, though, that if the state is viewed in Hobbesian, or classified-Hobbesian, terms as the representative or "general executive" of society or of a particular class, then the idea of a workers' state is a logical outgrowth - the state then becomes the "general executive" of the workers and represents their interests "in general" against the "particular" sectors of workers - this is in fact how the Bolsheviks often talk.

"I don't see how any of this adds anything new; it is really just
a static snapshot view of the power relations (i.e. leaving out the
history, and therefore the dynamics of the whole process). This kind of
makes it impossible to understand what Marx calls the movement from
formal to real subsumption, the nature of capitalist crises and what
Camatte calls the 'running away of capital', i.e. a certain loss of
agency on the part of the bourgeoisie itself."

I'm not necessarily saying it adds anything new - I think for instance that Kropotkin and Bakunin made similar arguments. My point is that it goes against what a lot of Marxists say - particularly those who either reduce the state to a "moment" of capitalism, or who accord it autonomy as an "institution" or "sphere" (without a specific class/discursive logic of its own).

The kind of logic I'm here attributing to the state is similar in kind to the idea of "tendency" in Marx - the attribution of general tendencies to the capitalist class, which provide its intentionality or dynamic in specific settings. Such tendencies are a kind of static view of the abstract machine of a class (its driving force), but hardly of history, since in practice tendencies enter into conflict and syncretism with different tendencies of different classes and forces - which is why the "Eighteenth Brumaire" does not read like "Capital". In other words, it is quite compatible with a diachronic moment of analysis.

I don't see why it makes any of those other things impossible to understand. The "running away of capital" has to do with the loss of agency of individual capitalists due to the kind of relations they construct; it doesn't have much to do with the state at all. As for formal and real subsumption, this is to do with how capitalism interacts with other tendencies associated with other classes - in formal subsumption, other tendencies are left intact but overcoded by capitalism; in real subsumption, the capitalist relation is established directly, at the expense of other tendencies - so it's a difference between syncretism and one-sided imposition with regard to non-capitalist logics. Obviously the state can also be syncretised with or imposed on by capital (the corporate/welfare, authoritarian/fascist, patronage, and developmental states would be more-or-less syncretic with the state as well as with other class logics, whereas the neoliberal state is more specifically capitalist); actually I think in the case of the neoliberal state (and also the authoritarian state), capitalism harnesses the state's logic to achieve capital's goals - which is not to say that it ceases to exist as an independent logic, only that it is channelled in such a way that it serves the purpose of another logic. (Early) Negri's analysis of the logic of "command" suggests that real subsumption may actually involve a broader logic under which "real subsumption" occurs, which is not "pure" capitalism but a fusion of capitalist and state/despotic logics.

"Tahir: None of the 'why' questions can be answered by putting it this
way. Why a neoliberal state, why this fusion, etc. A fusion implies two
different things coming together - where does each of them come from if
not from a common historical process? From separate worlds?"

In a sense, from separate worlds, yes. From different perspectives, different ways of viewing the world, which come together or flow apart in particular circumstances.

And, yes, I'm separating the moment of analysis of agents from the moment of analysis of situations; social logics arise from particular conceptions of the world which are connected to existential situations but which emerge as distinct, often conflictual, forces, whereas a situation does not arise from a single logic but rather an interaction of all those existing in the prior situation, which either syncretise or battle out whatever becomes the following situation. Doesn't Marx do precisely this in his historical works? The "Eighteenth Brumaire" or "Civil War in France" explains very little by reference to timeless characteristics of capital, and a lot by contingent conflicts.

I'd say the "why" questions require both an understanding of the many social logics operating in a situation, and an analysis of contingent fusions and conflicts which are always and necessarily contingent.

If you're looking for general explanations which answer the "why" questions from a "common historical process" underlying all the agents, as if some single inexorable mechanism reproduces itself across time and outcomes are inevitable rather than contingent, then you're looking for something you can't have. It requires a massive epistemic violence to rewrite history so as to fit any such general explanation, and it necessarily blurs the distinctions between social logics and historical forces.

If I were trying to explain, say, the Zapatistas, obviously I'd want to include the role of capitalist logics in transforming rural Mexico, the destruction of the commons, neoliberal reforms in energy policy and so on. I'd want to include the specific development of capitalist society and the state in Mexico, the PRI institutional bureaucracy and the structures of corruption. But none of this would explain why the rebellion of the rural poor took the form it did. To answer that "why question", one would need also to refer to the discourses of the poor, to the history of self-organisation, to the desire to resist, to indigenous cosmologies and belief-systems, to the preservation and transformation of indigenous discourse. All of this is coming from a "different world", from a sphere of life which is affected by capitalism and sometimes syncretises with it, but which is not at all reducible to it. On the general level, the situation in Chiapas could logically as easily have produced a traditional leftist guerrilla movement, or an opposition political party, or no resistance at all.

"Tahir: I think it would be very hard to describe this kind of a state
separated from capitalism. According to the view being propounded here
such a thing makes no sense. "

I partly have in mind the absolutist state, but mainly I'm thinking of the Stalinist regimes of the USSR, eastern Europe, China, North Korea and so on, especially in their harshest "high Stalinist" form. I don't think that the "law of value" (apparent self-valorisation of exchange-value) occurs in these societies, I don't think workers there were "free wage labourers" who were given an empty freedom to sell their labour to any employer (rather, they were conscripted by the state), and I don't think a bourgeoisie living off surplus extracted from workers by means of capital investment existed there either (as opposed to a bureaucratic class which extracted surplus from workers by "political" means of control of the finished product and despotic assignment of wages). Also, the capitalist world reacted to these states as it would to an external class force, not as it would to a variant form of capitalism. These regimes weren't "entirely external" in that they entered into relations with the capitalist world, and sometimes introduced capitalist relations to obtain efficiency; but capitalism wasn't the dominant social logic in these societies.

Andy