[AUT] re: questions

["Tahir Wood" <twood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Replies below
Tahir

>>> "Andy" <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx> 03/01/07 3:13 PM >>>
"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?).

Tahir: No, I was drawing attention to the bourgeois character of the
state, which I think was being questioned. What is important here is not
the similarity but the difference to the feudal state. Unlike the latter
the modern state is a nation state; I don't see how this can be divorced
from capitalism. A nation state is a homogenised entity within certain
territorial borders. What I mean here is that it has a standard
language, with standardised spelling, system of wieights and measures,
legal code, etc. with suppression of the non-standard forms in each
case. This seems to me to have the purpose of establishing a national
market, a national workforce, a national communication system, etc. Why
should we doubt that this is inherently connected with capitalism as the
project of the rising bourgeoisie?

  There's a little problem that "the state" is usually assumed to have
pre-existed the absolutist state 

Tahir: Yes, by approximately 10, 000 years, at the furthest estimate.
So?

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: No not fatal at all; one obviously have to allow for merchants
and early manufacturers  to become a fully fledged bourgeoisie as part
of this historical process. It would be absurd to posit a fully formed
bourgeoisie that preceded capitalism, who then simply brought into being
by their actions a fully elaborated capitalism.

"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: I avoid that use of 'moments', because it tends to conflate
structural and temporal elements in funny  and confusing ways. I think
it is equally wrong to posit a capitalism that is simply an abstraction
from these 'moments'. I am rather arguing for a certain agency on the
part of the bourgeoisie towards finding those social forms that would
serve their interests (valorisation). The totality of all forms that
this takes is in constant change, which was one of my points. 'Moments'
to me just confuses this historical process. What does matter here is
what the rising bourgeoisie had in their heads: law and order, Athenian
democracy, Voltaire, financial instruments, reform of state apparatuses,
anti-clericalism, etc. But at every historical moment what they were
doing was fighting against something, namely feudalism, and therefore
capitalism in its development is an anti-feudalism. This is what it
essentially is, the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against their
aristocratic oppressors.

"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.

Tahir: Maybe; I'm not sure. What I mean is that the state is the state
of the class struggle at that point in time, including struggles amongst
fractions of the bourgeoisie. I don't know what you call a statesman,
but I call him a bourgeois. This applies equally to the USSR. It was the
product of the class struggle within capitalism at that time in that
place. If I understand your logic you would deny all theses of state
capitalism that have been put forward regarding this.

"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.

Tahir: Yes, I see. My view is quite different to that; I see statism as
the counter-revolution within the worker's movement. It restores
capitalism in a new class compromise even as it 'abolishes' it.

"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).

Tahir: I think that if one separates the state (i.e. the bourgeois
state) from capitalism, that is in fact a form of reduction. It makes
the state into something rather spectral, without any substance at all.

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.

Tahir: In what way does a state have a logic? I don't really understand
this paragraph.

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: Goodness me, all I was suggesting is that the form of the state
follows from the progress of the class struggle. It has no other reason
to change. And therefore it is all about capitalism.

"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.

Tahir: I know what you're arguing against: economic determinism, base
and superstructure, etc. 'Single inexorable mechanism' and similar
phrases give that game away. But that's not what I'm saying. Nothing
exists before it is caused. So there is no 'inexorable' in my thinking.
As for 'mechanism', that cannot be admitted either. History is not a
mechanism for producing capitalism. It is a process of conflict between
different social agents. It constantly chrystallises as something new -
i.e. a highly complex and internally differentiated manifold - that is
only known, if at all, when it is already there. And as long as there is
class struggle it will always become something new again. The state is
among the outcomes of class struggle, as I am repeatedly saying, it is
not some grand design or something.

If I were trying to explain, say, the Zapatistas, obviously I'd want to
include the role of capitalist logics

Tahir: I'm starting to become suspicious of your use of this word
'logics', it sounds like one of those words that fills a gap in one's
theory.

 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. 

Tahir: See this is where we disagree. Capitalism was always a fight
against what preceded it; whether against the feudal lords, or against
the indigenous forms of society of peasants, etc. The fact is that fight
is still going on, either because of the need for continuing primitve
accummulation, or to clear the land, or to drive peasants off it and to
proletarianise them, etc. It's either wall to wall capitalism, or else
the word capitalism has no meaning. 

 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: Sure the struggle will have local aspects to it, of course,
these are themselves products of earlier historical developments, as
well as other contingencies, including learning from previous struggles
and critiques thereof.

"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,

Tahir: The absolutist state surely is part of the transition to
capitalism in that it was a strategy of capital at that point in its
development.

 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).

Tahir: Wow, so it wasn't capitalism at all? Despite the Taylorism,
Fordism, wage labour, transformation of countryside so that surplus
could support urban industry, etc. etc.? Don't forget that there are
many forms of capitalist society. Burundi or Mocambique do not look much
like London or New York in terms ofa range of features, but they are
capitalist. You seem to be taking the 'socialism' of USSR et al at face
value. But you ignore the inevitably transitionary nature of these
societies: 'communism' in its Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist forms was
always a transition from a backward semi-feudal capitalism to a modern
capitalism, a transition that Lenin et al did not believe could be left
up to the liberal bourgeoisie. 


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.

Tahir: Er ... Iraq? Iran? Not capitalist? The 'capitalist world'
doesn't like upstart insubordination and disobedience from any quarter.
That tells us nothing about the nations that are being reacted to in
this way. Bush made no distinction in his axis of evil between North
Korea on the one hand and Iran and Iraq on the other.

  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.

Tahir: I'm starting to think that what you mean when you say 'logic'
like this is actually something like 'discourse' or 'ideology'. If so
then I agree with you. Stalin did not think that he was marching Russia
from backwardness to modern capitalism, but that is what he was doing.
As Bordiga said, "capitalism is the revolution in agriculture". That was
what Stalin delivered, the revolution in agriculture. The fact that
Putin does not rule over a semi-feudal Russia today is due to Stalin and
his cohort. Which brings me back to my point about capitalist
development being essentially anti-feudalism.

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