aut-op-sy message, [AUT] Capitalism and the state (was re: questions)

"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."

Andy: Yes, that's one of the things I question. I don't think the modern state is "bourgeois" in several key senses, most notably it does not always serve the bourgeoisie, did not come into existence through the agency of the bourgeoisie, and it not internally restricted by the limits or driven by the conceptions or the contradictions of the bourgeoisie. It is not a "moment" of the "totality" in a Hegelian sense. The state has its own tendencies, conceptions, and contradictions which are irreducible to those of capitalism.

On the other hand, I would concede, firstly that the present state is modern (which is not the same as "bourgeois"); second, that the bourgeoisie needs the state; third, that actually-existing states are for contingent reasons fused with capitalism and with bourgeois logics.

Tahir: "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?"

Andy: For a whole number of reasons. One of these being that theorists of capitalism (liberals for instance) have always been concerned to limit the state. Another, that there is not a simple correlation between the rise of these modern, standardising measures and the rise of capitalism proper; for instance, absolutist states often pursued standardisation. Thirdly, that the state outlasted the overthrow of capitalism in the Stalinist societies and survived without it. Fourth, because the state acts as an autonomous class force in cases such as Bonapartism, fascism, the "developmental state", etc. Fifth, because there are similarities as well as differences between the modern and pre-modern state.

I think you are here confusing a functionality with a purpose. It is indeed functional for capitalism that the state standardises in certain ways; this does not mean that capitalism is the purpose of this standardisation, especially since in many cases it preceded the development of capitalism.

Tahir: "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."

Andy: So what is your claim? That a partially formed bourgeoisie predeced capitalism and brought into being a full, or a partial, capitalist state? But did the rise of the absolutist state really come from the pre-capitalist merchants? I seriously doubt it, but even if so - did they do so for capitalist, or mercantile reasons?

Tahir:"I don't know what you call a statesman,
but I call him a bourgeois."

Andy: If I was being polite and analytical, I'd call "him" (or her) a statist, or a bureaucrat (though those in development studies use the term "political class" instead, Djilas "new class", and there are other names too). If I was being rude, I'd call him or her a pig - which is nonetheless distinct from being a boss. There are few who can't tell a pig from a boss, even though they're usually on the same side.

Tahir: "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)."

Andy: So we've established that you're an instrumentalist/intentionalist rather than a structuralist. But this seems to involve a very strong claim of agency which would take some proving shall we say. First, you've admitted the bourgeoisie did not exist "fully formed" before capitalism - so how could it construct institutions to form interests which it did not already have? Second, how can this group, or its successor, the fully-fledged bourgeoisie, be sure of having true consciousness rather than false consciousness of its beliefs - especially when a discourse analysis of its texts reveals these to be awash with what from this perspective can only be termed mystification?

Also, I would add that the claim that the bourgeoisie built the modern state because it serves the interests of the bourgeoisie, still would not make this state bourgeois. It would simply make it useful to the bourgeoisie. To compare: if someone builds a hammer because it is useful to them, this does not make the hammer human.

Tahir: "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."

Andy: I would agree that what is in the heads of social agents is important, but I would locate this firmly at the level of discourse, not interests. Patently it is possible to have all kinds of things in one's head which are not in one's interest!

But in fact your historical account makes little sense. Firstly because what was in the heads of early liberals and merchants was certainly not the modern state as it eventually emerged. Secondly because in most of the world the state form was imposed by colonial fiat, not at all in rebellion against feudalism. Thirdly because even in Europe, the situation is far more complex - in particular, the absolutist state does not seem to have grown from bourgeois agency, but rather, from agency of the state itself in a pre-capitalist period. In Germany the "modern" state was the state of the Junkers for example. In the risorgimento there was a definite "political class" autonomous from capitalist agency. In England/Britain, a fusion of aristocracy and bourgeoisie.

I'll grant that a set of distinctly modern existential constructs and discourses, such as homogeneous empty time and a micropolitics of disciplinary regulation, seem generative in relation to both capitalism and the modern state. But I don't see how this makes the state "bourgeois".

Tahir: "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."

Andy: This is either tautology or nonsense.

If you mean that the state is structured in a way that results from the balance of social forces in a society, and that the state's power is limited by the balance of social forces, then this is true, but it is tautologically true of any social force - one could as well say "the bourgeoisie is the is the bourgeoisie of the class struggle at that point in time", or "the working class is the working class of the class struggle at that point in time". Saying this would neither affirm nor deny the autonomy of this particular social force.

If on the other hand you mean that the state is simply a reflection of the balance of other social forces, and thus cannot be a social force itself, then the claim is clearly nonsense given the various cases where it clearly acts as a separate force in a situation (Bonapartism even, let alone Stalinism or absolutism).

Yes, I disagree with theories of state capitalism. The reason for this is I don't see how the fundamental contradictions of capitalism were operating in state society. I don't see how value was valorising itself. I don't see how workers were free to sell their labour power to the highest bidder. And I don't see why world capitalism would work so hard to smash something which was just another form of capitalism.

I'd agree that statism in the workers' movement is "counter-revolutionary", in the sense of expressing the logic of another class. But I don't see how it's specifically capitalist.

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."

Andy: It makes the state into a social logic. Similar to, say, capitalism as a social logic.

Why is it more reductive to accord this status to the state, than to accord this status to capitalism?

Your argument here echoes the poststructuralist objection to Marxism - that talking about capitalism in general makes capitalism "something rather spectral" and insubstantial, which detracts from the specificity of particular capitalisms. Why would this objection be valid for you in the state case, but not in the case of capitalism?

To accord the state this status is simply to accord it the same status as capital, as a tendency which is realised to varying extents, in different combinations with other social forces, etc.

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

Andy: A social logic is like a tendency in Marx; I would say "tendency" is Marx's name for a social logic.

In "The State: Its Historic Role", Kropotkin refers to the state's inherent tendency as the "political principle". In this case, the term "principle" is Kropotkin's name for a social logic.

An example of the state's logic is that states seek to hierarchise or verticalise social relations, so as to ensure regulation and social control. Another is that the state seeks to privilege itself by means of violence, to suppress and delegitimate other kinds of violence, and thus to extract resources for itself or its own projects. Another is that the state seeks to destroy bases of loyalty and community other than itself, if and when these come into conflict with its own demands for loyalty and community. Another, that states express reactive rather than active attachments. Another, that states express master-signification. Another, that it overcodes.

These are distinct from the tendencies of capitalism. For example, capital tends to deterritorialise, whereas the state tends to overcode. Capitalism tends to reduce value to exchange-value and the equivalential function of the commodity form, whereas the state tends to reduce value to its own power (to view itself as the source of value). Capitalism extracts surplus by means of wage labour, the state extracts surplus by means of direct command.

These tendencies can be combined and "balanced" in various combinations (and capital realises that it is necessary to restrict the state to preserve itself), but on a structural level they are distinct.

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"

Andy: Hmm. Well certainly the state often changes in response to class struggles it is involved in, as does the bourgeoisie, as does the working class. But presumably you do not deny that these classes have their own basis for movement aside from the progress of the class struggle, which is realised to the extent that they are "winning" in this struggle? For instance, that capital seeks to proletarianise labour, to extract surplus value and to negotiate its own internal contradictions, as well as responding to working-class actions, for instance by trying to overcome strikes by atomising workers or mechanising factories?

Why, then, is it difficult to say the same of the state: that it has its own dynamics of movement as well as responding to what other classes do?

Tahir: "History is not a
mechanism for producing capitalism. It is a process of conflict between
different social agents. "

Andy: Indeed. And why refuse to admit the state as one of these "different social agents"?

Tahir: "It's either wall to wall capitalism, or else
the word capitalism has no meaning. "

Andy: Is that your position, or a straw-man position you're attributing to me?

In either case, you're failing to understand my point about logics/tendencies.

Tahir: "Capitalism was always a fight
against what preceded it; whether against the feudal lords, or against
the indigenous forms of society of peasants, etc. "

Andy: Not "precedes", exceeds. Capitalism is a struggle against autonomous spaces, whether these are indigenous, peasant, urban poor, or something like the European squatters' movement (Ungdomhuset still fresh in my mind). To exceed simply means that it expresses a social logic which is not capital's.

Of course, capital seeks to make itself "wall to wall" as much as it can, and if it can't, to subordinate or syncretise other social forms to maximise its own _expression_. This is true also of many other social logics, including the state.

Tahir: "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. "

Andy: And this means what, exactly?

If it's transitional to capitalism - a conclusion, incidentally, which makes sense only in retrospect - then it wasn't capitalist itself. So what was it? Feudal, perhaps?

And, surely Lenin, Mao, Stalin et al did not believe they were constructing a transition to capitalism? In which case we are back to projects without intent - in contrast to your discussion of absolutism, where intent is everything - and raises the question of what kinds of social relations they were trying to realise, since these bear little resemblance either to socialism or capitalism. It elides completely the distinct agency of the Stalinist elites.

Again: this does not explain why capitalism in the west hated these regimes so much. I would expect it to welcome regimes which simply exist as conduits for a transition to capitalism.

Tahir: " 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. "

Andy: Indeed, but mustn't certain structural logics and class relations pertain for them to be called capitalist?

Actually, I might (depending on circumstances) be led to question whether Burundi or Mozambique (as distinct from their export sectors specifically) are entirely capitalist, since one has to factor in subsistence/peasant economics and the operation of state patronage networks and direct intervention (in Burundi for instance, a history of quasi-genocides). It isn't a foregone conclusion that capitalism would trump these logics if and when they came into conflict - in Zimbabwe for instance, state patronage has clearly overridden the market in terms of distribution of agricultural lands (provoking hostility from transnational capital and the core states).

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."

Andy: Actually Iraq and Iran both have/had strong state-led patronage networks sufficient to interfere with smooth resource extraction ("crony capitalism" is a kind of syncretism, but perhaps too syncretic for the neoliberals). But in any case, the west never had the same unambiguously hostile reaction to these regimes as to Soviet and Chinese Stalinism at their peak.