Part II
6
Peter Burnham
There are two significant methodological sins commonly committed by those claiming to offer a Marxist approach to international relations. The first is to assume that Marx’s work can only be rendered intelligible for an international relations audience through a reading of Lenin (and less frequently through Stalin and Mao). This results in the adoption of a quite uncritical statist world-view rooted in a determinist, structuralist methodology far removed from Marx’s rich critique of classical political economy. If the first sin plunges Marx into Parsonian structural-functionalism, the second reduces Marxism to the status of empiricist sociology with the plaintive cry, what about the workers? In the hands of ‘Marxist sociologists’ and neo-Gramscian international relations theorists, ‘class’ is all too easily detached from the social relations of production, becoming just another ‘interest’ in a methodology characterised by Weberian factor analysis.
To remedy these ills it is necessary to return to the central works of Marx to clarify the concepts ‘class’, ‘capital’ and ‘state’. This is the only basis on which Marx’s approach to international relations can be recovered. The interpretation developed in this chapter emphasises the centrality of class struggle and sees the state as an aspect of the social relations of production. As I shall outline, this approach has a long history in Western Marxism and has most recently been articulated under the banner of ‘open Marxism’. The chapter therefore begins by discussing the fundamentals of ‘open Marxism’, drawing particular attention to the concepts of ‘class’, ‘labour’ and ‘struggle’. This provides the background for discussing how a class struggle theory of the state can be developed from Marx’s account of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. By way of conclusion the chapter highlights how Marx’s discussion of the circulation of capital provides a basis for analysing recent developments in the global political economy.
Towards an ‘open' interpretation of Marx
The call for the development of ‘open Marxism’ is a response to the crisis of theory produced by the various forms of deterministic ‘closed Marxism’, which dominated radical discourse following the articulation of the state ideology Marxism-Leninism.1 The attempt to break away from the reductionist dogmatism of Marxist structural-functionalism while avoiding the complementary error of humanistic subjectivism has a long tradition in Marxist thought.2 Consistent with the ‘open’, critical tradition is the work produced by, among others, Luxemburg, Korsch, Bloch, Rubin, Pashukanis, Rosdolsky, the Italian tradition of ‘autonomist’ Marxism and more recently by contributors to debates on value and the state held in the early years of the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE).3
This particular approach to Marxism is ‘open’ in three main respects. First, its rejection of all forms of determinism is based on reasserting the centrality of class struggle. Class, in this view, is not to be understood in sociological fashion as a static, descriptive term applied to groups of individuals sharing common experiences or life-chances or workplace relations. Rather it is recognised that the separation of labour from the means of production, and thereby the existence of private property, indicates that we are all born into a class society The class relation between capital and labour is already present, already presupposed, the moment the possessor of money and the possessor of labour power confront each other as buyer and seller (Marx 1978: 114). As Clarke (1978: 42) clarifies, it is the concept of class relations as being analytically prior to the political, economic and ideological forms taken by those relations (even though class relations have no existence independently of those forms) that makes it possible for a Marxist analysis to conceptualise the complexity of the relations between the economic and the political, and their interconnections as complementary forms of the fundamental class relation, without abandoning the theory for a pragmatic pluralism. Class relations, in this sense, are of course antagonistic relations. Class struggle therefore lies at the heart of Marx’s account of accumulation as capital must not only extract surplus from labour daily in the production process but must also ensure the successful reproduction of the total social circuit of capital through its three principal forms. This calls for constant ‘intervention’ from state managers and for the establishment of various forms of international regimes and institutions. If the circuit of capital is understood in terms of struggle and potential crisis then determinism of all kinds is rejected. Struggle, as Holloway (1991: 71) points out, by definition is uncertain and leaves outcomes open. In essence this version of Marxism, based on an understanding of the complexities of the rotation of capital, focuses on resistance to the imposition of work and thereby points to the fragility of capitalism as a system of class domination.
Second, this interpretation of Marxism is anchored in the methodological approach of form-analysis. Rather than understanding form in terms of species (the form of something more basic which lies behind the appearance), the ‘open’ tradition sees form as a mode of existence – something exists only in and through the forms it takes (Bonefeld et al. 1992: xv). Hence Marx’s advance over the classical political economists who mistook the bourgeois form of social production for eternal, natural relations of production, thereby failing to see the specificity of the value-form and consequently of the commodity-form, the money-form and the productive-form. The importance of this distinction is not only that it sensitises us to the fluidity of social relations but more fundamentally it breaks with the old appearance/essence distinction which has long bedevilled Marxism. Money capital and commodity capital do not, for instance, denote branches of business that are independent and separate from one another. Rather they are simply particular functional forms of industrial capital, ‘modes of existence of the various functional forms that industrial capital constantly assumes and discards within the circulation sphere’ (Marx 1978: 136). Capital, as self-valorising value, should be understood as ‘movement’, as a circulatory process, not as a static thing or structure (Marx 1978: 185). Likewise, it is unnecessary to remain fixed in statist fashion to ideas of the enduring nature of the nation-state. Instead our focus is on the changing character of the form of the ‘political’ in relation to the circuit of capital. Form-analysis also presents an alternative to the deterministic base/superstructure image of Marxism. In this ‘hard structural determinist’ reading, exemplified by one-dimensional Soviet Marxism-Leninism, the ‘economic base’ determines the ‘political superstructure’, thus rendering redundant any serious analysis. Although Engels later tried to soften this approach by introducing the notion of ‘determinant in the last instance’, this has done little to dissuade structuralist Marxists (and technological determinists) from the view that ‘the economy’ should be awarded primacy when studying social formations. The state in this model is seen as epiphenomenal, its existence reducible to the ‘economic base’ and changes in state policy are understood as merely reflecting altered economic relations. The notion of ‘relative autonomy’ has done little to correct this ‘reductionist’ reading of Marx. Open Marxism interprets the base/superstructure metaphor as a provisional level of abstraction useful only for very limited analytical purposes (Sklar 1988: 9). Monocausal economism is thereby replaced with the dialectical notion that social relations of production only exist in the form of economic, legal and political relations. It is not simply a case of arguing in Weberian fashion that each of these relations exercise reciprocal and causative influence. Rather, Marx is at pains to stress that antagonistic class relations are always manifest in economic, political and legal forms. In this way ‘economics’ rests as firmly on ‘politics’ and ‘law’ as vice versa (Wood 1981). The fundamental error of determinist schools is that they understand the social relations of production in terms of technical economic relations, thereby replicating the fetishism that Marx’s critique of classical political economy sought to dispel.
Finally, open Marxism breaks with mainstream international relations theory by rejecting methodologies based on positivism. The error of positivistic orthodoxy, Marx outlines in the Grundrisse, is that it simply brings outward appearances into an external relationship with one another, ‘the crudity and lack of comprehension lies precisely in that organically coherent factors are brought into a haphazard relation with one another, i.e. into a purely speculative connection’ (Marx 1986a: 26). Unlike non-dialectical research which begins with an isolated unit and attempts to reconstruct the whole by establishing external connections, dialectical research starts with the whole and then searches for the substantive abstraction which constitutes social phenomena as interconnected, complex forms different from, but united in, each other (Bonefeld 1993: 21; Ollman 1993: 12–17; Rosdolsky 1977). Notions of externality and structure are replaced by the dialectical categories of process and contradictory internal relationship. While non-dialectical methodologies in social science are based on abstract, ahistorical principles used simply to reorder everyday observable events, Marx begins by noting that capitalist society is an historically specific form of the social production process in general. Like all its forerunners capitalist production proceeds under certain material conditions, which are also expressed as specific social relations that individuals enter into in the process of reproducing their life. The key therefore to understanding the character of social relations within capitalism, and thereby the inner connection between apparently disparate phenomena, lies in tracing how definite social relations between men assume the fantastic form of relations between things. This task requires a critical theory, not a methodology which asserts that all knowledge must only be based on the observable. Hence, for Marx, diverse phenomena such as the state and the economy do not exist as externally related entities but as moments of the class relation from which they are constituted (Bonefeld 1992: 100).
In opposition therefore to most international relations theory, the open Marxist tradition understands the ‘state’ as an aspect of a wider and more fundamental set of social relations based on the separation of labour from the conditions of production. The state should not be seen as ‘autonomous’ or as ‘determined’ by a supposed ‘economic base’. Rather, the starting point is that provided by Evgeny Pashukanis (1978: 139) who poses the question,
why does class rule not remain what it is, the factual subjugation of one section of the population by the other? Why does it assume the form of official state rule, or which is the same thing – why does the machinery of state coercion not come into being as the private machinery of the ruling class?; why does it detach itself from the ruling class and take on the form of an impersonal apparatus of public power, separate from society?
Similarly in relation to the market, why do goods and services take the form of commodities? Why do the products of labour confront each other as commodities? The chief originality of Marx’s work is that he completes classical political economy’s analysis of value and its magnitude and goes on to reformulate the basis of social science by asking ‘why this content has assumed that particular form’ (Marx 1976: 174).
Class struggle and the state
Applying the dialectical method to the study of the state involves first specifying, on a very general level, the relationship between labour and political domination. Marx is emphatic that the most significant distinguishing feature of each social formation is not so much how the bulk of the labour of production is done, but how the dominant propertied classes controlling the conditions of production ensure the extraction of the surplus which makes their dominance possible (De Ste. Croix 1981: 52). Marx’s most direct exposition of this point is in Capital Volume 3 (1981: 927), where he writes:
The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers … in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short the specific form of state in each case.
The ‘state’ understood as ‘politically organised subjection’ (Abrams 1988) charged with the enforcement of rule, empowered to exercise force to safeguard the relations which constitute the social order, is to be understood as the ‘moment of coercion’ without which no class society can exist. The originality of Marx’s work is that he understands the ‘political’ as a form constituted by the antagonistic relationship between the direct producers and the owners of production (Holloway and Picciotto 1977; Holloway 1995). In this way he provides not a functionalist but a class struggle theory of the state. Objectivist readings of Marx couched in terms of forces and relations of production, impending cataclysmic crisis and growing class consciousness, are supplanted by an approach which sees the future as essentially open, to be realised in struggle with no predetermined lines of development.
This reformulation seeks to reinstate exploitation (not consciousness or common awareness) as the hallmark of class. As De Ste. Croix (1981: 43) points out, ‘class (essentially a relationship) is the collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which exploitation is embodied in a social structure’. Exploitation, as the appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others, can take a number of forms. For instance, surplus can be extracted through the exploitation of wage labour or it can be obtained from unfree labour (chattel slaves, serfs or debt bondsmen). While classes are identified by their position in the whole system of social production (above all according to their degree of ownership or control of the conditions of production), class struggle is the inevitable process of domination and resistance which results from the exploitation of labour. As De Ste. Croix (1981: 44, 57) explains, it may not necessarily involve collective action by a class as such, and it may or may not include activity on a political plane. To see class struggle simply in terms of class consciousness and active political conflict is to lose the meaning ascribed to it by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, and more importantly, leads to the vacuous conclusion that it is absent from most capitalist societies today. By placing exploitation at the heart of class it is possible to arrive at a more subtle conclusion. The ruling class is engaged in a permanent struggle which calls forth continuous resistance. Even slaves who are kept in irons and are driven with a whip can conduct some kind of passive resistance, if only by quiet sabotage and breaking a tool or two (De Ste. Croix 1981: 66). In contemporary capitalism, struggles to resist the imposition of labour take a variety of forms: from unofficial workplace disputes to official industrial stoppages; from community action to one-day demonstrations; and from simple lack of cooperation at work to absenteeism, illness and sabotage.
In summary, Marx argues that our first task is to focus on the relationship between the direct producers and the owners of production to ascertain how the ruling class secures the extraction of surplus value. The particular form and mode in which the connection between workers and means of production is effected is what distinguishes the various economic epochs of the social structure (Marx 1978: 120). On this basis it is possible to introduce consideration of the state, since, as Clarke (1983: 118) clarifies,
the state does not constitute the social relations of production, it is essentially a regulative agency, whose analysis, therefore, presupposes the analysis of the social relations of which the state is regulative. The analysis of the capitalist state conceptually presupposes the analysis of capital and of the reproduction of capitalist relations of production, despite the fact that in reality, of course, the state is itself a moment of the process of reproduction.
The character of the capitalist state, and by implication the international state system, is therefore to be analysed against the background of the contradictions inherent in the development and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production. Marx lays the basis for this analysis in his historical studies of the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Marx’s account of the rise of the modern state is set in the context of the social struggles which accompanied the overthrow of feudal relations of property and production.4 In his reading, the character of old civil (feudal) society was directly political. An individual’s position within an estate determined his/her political relation, that is, his/her separation and exclusion from other components of society. As clarified in Capital Volume One (1976: 170),
here, instead of the independent man, we find everyone dependent – serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clerics. Personal dependence characterises the social relations of material production as much as it does the other spheres of life based on that production.
In these circumstances different subdivisions of trade and industry are the property of different corporations; court dignities and jurisdiction are the property of particular estates; and the various provinces the property of individual princes. Hence, in the Middle Ages we find serfs, feudal estates, merchant and trade guilds, and corporations of scholars, with each sphere (property, trade, society, man) directly political – ‘every private sphere has a political character or is a political sphere; that is, politics is a characteristic of the private spheres too’ (1975a: 32).
This discussion of the identity of civil and political society. in feudalism has important ramifications for theorising the emergence of the capitalist state form. Marx saw the identity of the civil and political estates as the expression of the identity of civil and political society Within each individual principality, the princedom was a particular estate – ‘their estate was their state’ (1975a: 72) – which had certain privileges but which was correspondingly restricted by the privileges of the other estates. As Marx summarises, ‘they did not become political estates because they participated in legislation; on the contrary, they participated in legislation because they were political estates’ (1975a: 73). To this can be added the significant rider that the relation of estates to the Empire was merely a treaty relationship of various states with nationality, ‘their legislative activity, their voting of taxes for the Empire, was only a particular expression of their general political significance and effectiveness’ (1975a: 72).
Thus within feudal social relations, although the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope stood at the apex, the structure was not a continuous hierarchy but rather sovereignty was parcellised and acts of force were not centrally orchestrated or rooted in a general system of right (Kay and Mott 1982: 80–4). In the feudal corvee, force was applied directly to serfs as producers, compelling them to produce rent for the lord. This force was particular, applied to each serf separately, in contrast to the compulsion to work in capitalism which operates through an impersonal labour market. ‘Relations therefore were not mediated through a central authority, but were made directly at all points … feudal relations of production were immediately relations of power’ (Kay and Mott 1982: 82). By contrast capitalist relations take place through the apparent exchange of equivalents. Labour and capital meet in the ‘exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham’ (Marx 1976: 280), brought together by a contract whose very nature expels all immediate political content. As Kay and Mott (1982: 83) make clear, a crucial presupposition of modern contract is that both parties are deprived of the right to act violently in defence of their own interests, with the consequence that, ‘in a society of equivalents relating to each other through contract, politics is abstracted out of the relations of production, and order becomes the task of a specialised body – the state’. In this way, the state as the particularised embodiment of rule, and the replacement of privilege by equivalence, are part of the same process, since ‘citizens’ only face each other through the medium of the state which is ‘equidistant’ from them. In short, ‘the abstraction of the state as such belongs only to modern times. The abstraction of the political state is a modern product’ (Marx 1975a: 32).
The emergence of the capitalist state form was neither an automatic response to the development of world trade, nor simply a matter of the peaceful transfer of power from one class to another. Capitalist relations of production were established through the struggles of the peasantry and the nascent middle class who sought freedom from the dependencies of the Middle Ages. The long-run history of the decline of feudalism in England, for example, shows that although the crises of feudalism began in the thirteenth century it was not until the mid seventeenth century that the abolition of feudal tenures facilitated capital accumulation and the consolidation of property which formed the basis for the eighteenth-century Whig oligarchy (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 82; Hilton 1978). In this period feudal social relations came under increased pressure as rural depopulation aggravated struggles over feudal rents between the land-owning class and the peasantry. In the second half of the fourteenth century, falling feudal rents intensified the crisis of feudalism as competition between lords and heightened demands on peasants from ecclesiastical estates resulted in increased pressure for an enlarged surplus product. The success of the English manorial peasantries in resisting this pressure was reflected juridically in the virtual disappearance of servile villeinage which allowed the retention of surplus on peasant holdings, a degree of social differentiation and prosperity among the peasant community, and a slow reorientation towards small-scale commodity production for domestic and international markets (Hilton 1973 and 1978; Dobb 1946). The response of the threatened ruling class, in this instance the nobility, was the absolutist state, summarised by Anderson (1974: 18) as ‘a redeployed and recharged apparatus of feudal domination – designed to clamp the peasant masses back into their traditional social position, despite and against the gains they had won by the commutation of dues’. However, the struggles of the nascent bourgeoisie transformed the absolutist state from an apparatus for the defence of aristocratic property and privilege, into an institution whose concentration of power facilitated the changes required by the nascent mercantile and manufacturing classes in the phase of ‘primitive accumulation’.
In the first draft of The Civil War in France, Marx (1986b: 483–4) recognises that
the centralised state machinery which, with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, entoils (enmeshes) the living civil society like a boa constrictor, was first forged in the days of absolute monarchy as a weapon of nascent middle-class society in its struggle of emancipation from feudalism.
The seignorial privileges of the medieval lords and clergy were transformed into the attribute of a unitary state power, displacing the feudal dignitaries by salaried state officials, and transferring arms from medieval retainers of the landlords to a standing army. Nevertheless, the development of bourgeois society remained clogged by ‘all manner of medieval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitutions’ (Marx 1986b: 328). In France the gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the eighteenth century swept away these relics, while in England, although historians dispute points of subtlety concerning the English Civil War, there is little question that between 1660 and 1700, the independent power of the Crown was broken, never to be regained. Corrigan and Sayer (1985: 79) interpret this period as ‘a watershed in the long making of the “State” as an impersonal body, a transcendent object representing “society”, the Leviathan theorised by Hobbes in these years as “Mortall God”’. Between these dates we can trace the birth of the Treasury, the Board of Trade, and the restructured Secretary of State’s departments. Also, the introduction of Common Law providing stability and liberty for property ownership. Correspondingly, legislation against non-Parliamentary taxation was confirmed in 1660, financially subordinating the Crown to Parliament. Finally, the Navigation Acts of 1661 enabled the creation of the closed colonial system, providing for the subordination of the colonies to Parliament (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 83).5
The historic change in the form of the state occurred gradually as political revolutions overthrew sovereign power (which constituted the political state as a matter of general concern), and fundamental class struggles, which were both prompted by and were expressions of changing social relations of production, ‘necessarily smashed all estates, corporations, guilds, and privileges, since they were all manifestations of the separation of the people from the community’ (Marx 1975b: 166; Clarke 1988). These struggles simultaneously abolished the direct political character of civil society while creating the modern state. Gradually relations within civil society were transformed from the ‘motley feudal ties’ characterised by ‘the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour … and chivalrous enthusiasm’ (Marx and Engels 1976: 487), to the crass materialism of modern private property relations subject to the rule of money and law, and the egotistical struggle of each against all. Marx is emphatic:
the establishment of the political state and the dissolution of civil society into independent individuals – whose relations with one another depend on law, just as the relations of men in the system of estates and guilds depended on privilege – is accomplished by one and the same act.
(1975b: 167)
The ‘abstraction’ or ‘particularisation’ of the modern state sets limits to its powers (Clarke 1988: 127–8). The state merely gives form to the social relations whose substance is determined in civil society, so that the state ‘has to confine itself to a formal and negative activity, for where civil life and its labour begin, there the power of the administration ends’ (Marx 1975c: 198). The formal and regulatory activity par excellence of the state is to uphold the basis of the new social relations which comprise the framework of civil society.
Therein for Marx, the capitalist state is ‘based on the contradiction between public and private life, on the contradiction between general interests and private interests’ (1975d: 46). By upholding the rule of law and money, the state maintains the formal discipline of the market, and thereby mediates the contradiction between the expression of general and particular interests. This discipline must necessarily be imposed in an ‘independent form’ which is divorced from private interests: ‘Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their common interest, the latter is asserted as an interest “alien” to them, and “independent” of them … in the form of the state’ (Marx 1975d: 46–7; Clarke 1988).
From the ‘state', to national states in the global economy
It has proved remarkably difficult to develop a critical Marxist theory of the international state system which avoids the crudities and absurdities of Marxism-Leninism base/superstructure dogma.6 A major problem has turned on reconciling a view of ‘the state’ primarily defined relative to a domestic class structure, with the fact that the state is a component of an international state system (Barker 1978; Picciotto 1991; Callinicos 1992). As Picciotto (1991: 217) has pointed out, this tendency has been greater in Marxist than non-Marxist writing, since the Marxist emphasis on the class nature of the state has made it necessary to discuss the state in relation to society, and it has become convenient to assume a correlation between the society and the classes within it and the state within that society.
This difficulty however is more apparent than real and is a product of conflating levels of analysis. The capitalist state form is not derived from a ‘domestic’ analysis, to which ‘external’ determinants are then appended a posteriori. As indicated above, the capitalist form of the state is derived from an analysis of the class struggles which undermined feudal social relations. When turning to analyse contemporary global relations it is fundamental to switch our focus and level of abstraction from ‘the state’ (capitalist state form) to particular national states and more broadly to the political management of the global circuits of capital (Holloway 1995). In so doing we are confronted with the following paradox. While from its earliest stages capitalist accumulation has proceeded on a global level, national states have developed on the basis of the principle of territoriality of jurisdiction. The fragmentation of the ‘political’ into national states, which from their very inception comprise an international system, has developed in an uneven fashion alongside the internationalisation of capital. As Picciotto (1991: 217) further clarifies, the transition from the personal sovereign to an abstract sovereignty of public authorities over a defined territory was a key element in the development of the capitalist international system, since it provided a multifarious framework which permitted and facilitated the global circulation of commodities and capital. The ‘capitalist state’ thus originated in the context of an international system of states establishing a framework for the generalisation of commodity production based (initially) on petty commodity production and a world market.
This view which locates the development of the capitalist state in the establishment and maintenance of generalised commodity production, offers a distinctive way of understanding the emergence of the global political economy. Whereas world-systems theorists similarly emphasise the absolute dependence of the world economy on the state system, in taking a global perspective it is neither necessary nor helpful to start from the market. As Picciotto (1991) again outlines, in Wallerstein’s schema it is the world market and the consequent international division of labour that allocated a particular role to each region, from which flowed the relationship of exploitation and hence the form of the state. However, it was not trade that transformed production relations, but the contradictions of feudal and post-feudal production relations that led to transformations both of the world market and the form of the state (Brenner 1977; Rosenberg 1994). By viewing national states as political nodes in the global flow of capital, it is possible to avoid both the Smithian bias introduced by focusing uncritically on the market and the mistakes of orthodox IPE (international political economy) which treat state and market as independent variables.
In this light, class relations do not impinge on the state, they do not exist in ‘domestic’ society and make their presence felt by influencing the state which operates in the international realm. Rather the state itself is a form of the class relation which constitutes global capitalist relations. These relations appear, for example, as British relations on the world market. Yet as Marx clarifies in The Civil War in France, struggles between states are to be understood, at a more abstract level, as struggles between capital and labour which assume more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour. The notion of ‘integration’ into the global economy does not imply that a state could choose not to be integrated. A political strategy of ‘national economic autonomy’ has always been, in an absolute sense, impossible. Policy is not made in the absence of the global economy. It is made within an international context as each state is a participant in the global economy. Such a perspective does not mean that national policies are of secondary importance. Rather, it locates them within a context in which these policies exist and through which they develop. National states exist as political ‘nodes’ or ‘moments’ in the global flow of capital and their development is therefore part of the antagonistic and crisis-ridden development of capitalist society. The state itself cannot resolve the global crisis of capital. It can, however, enhance its position in the hierarchy of the price system by increasing the efficiency of capitalist exploitation operating within its boundaries (Bonefeld et al. 1995).
A conceptualisation of capitalism in terms of the aggregation of national economies makes it impossible to understand the constraints imposed on national states which derive from their role as political managers of global circuits of capital. Unless one conceptualises the global mode of existence of the labour/capital relation, then balance of payments problems, pressure on currency, exchange rate fluctuations, and problems of public debt can only be understood as impinging on individual states through external forces (Bonefeld 1993). The open Marxist approach suggests that the apparent solidity of the ‘state’ masks its existence as a contradictory form of global social relationship. The state is not only an institution but a form-process, an active process of forming social relations and therefore class struggles channelling them into non-class forms – citizens’ rights, international human rights – which promote the disorganisation of labour (Holloway 1991: 75–6). The key to comprehending capitalist society is that it is a global social system based on the imposition of work through the commodity-form (Cleaver 1979: 71–86). The reproduction of bourgeois social relations at all levels (from the overseer, to the managing director, state managers, international agencies, and alliances between states) rests upon the ability of capital (in all its forms and guises) to harness and contain the power of labour within the bounds of the commodity-form. The struggles which ensue over the imposition of work, the regulation of consumption through the commodification of labour time as money and the confinement of the production of use values within the bounds of profitability produce constant instability and crisis. It is the everyday struggles in and against the dominance of the commodity-form which are manifest as ‘national’ economic crises or balance of payments problems or speculative pressure on currency. Thus Marx’s approach to international relations does not reject the ‘state’ as a category but rather sees relations between national states in terms of the antagonistic social relationships which constitute states as political moments of the global composition of class relations.7
The political ‘management' of global circuits of capital
A number of implications flow from the view that states should be conceptualised as political nodes in the global flow of capital. The first relates directly to current debates on whether capitalism has entered a new stage characterised by globalisation. If we theorise the class relation as a global social relationship and national states as political nodes active in the reproduction of global circuits of capital, then ‘globalisation’ loses some of its mystique. States are not to be thought of as ‘thing-like’ institutions losing power to the market. Rather, in a context characterised by the intensive and extensive development of the global circuits, state managers have been able to reorganise their core activities using market processes to ‘depoliticise’ the management of difficult aspects of public policy (Burnham 1999). It should be no surprise that a global system resting on an antagonistic social relationship will be subject to dynamic change as both state and market actors seek to remove what they perceive to be blockages in the flow of capital. In essence, state managers are above all circuit managers. ‘Globalisation’ presents serious problems for approaches based on national conceptions of capitalism and for those frameworks that insist on regarding ‘states’ and ‘markets’ as fundamentally opposed forms of social organisation. However, for the open Marxist tradition ‘globalisation’ simply represents a deepening of existing circuits and a broadening of the ‘political’, as regulative agencies (both public and private) beyond the national state are drawn into the complex process of ‘managing’ the rotation of capital. To develop this point further it is necessary to grasp Marx’s discussion of the total circulation process of capital.
In Capital Volume 1, Marx introduces the ‘general formula of capital’. Capital in its most general form is defined as value that expands itself, ‘the value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but increases its magnitude, adds to itself a surplus-value, or is valorised. And this movement converts it into capital’ (1976: 252). While passing through the sphere of circulation (as money-capital and commodity-capital) there can be a redistribution of value but its magnitude cannot be increased. Hence Marx identifies the commodity which when purchased can be used in production to create new value – labour power. In Capital Volume 2 Marx continues this discussion emphasizing that capital, as self-valorizing value, is a movement, a circulatory process that passes through a sequence of transformations, a series of metamorphoses that form so many phases or stages of a total process (1978: 132). Two of the phases, or forms of capital, belong to the circulation sphere (money-capital and commodity-capital), one to the sphere of production (productive capital). As Marx summarises,
the capital that assumes these forms in the course of its total circuit, discards them again and fulfils in each of them its appropriate function, is industrial capital – industrial here in the sense that it encompasses any branch of production that is pursued on a capitalist basis.
(1978: 133)
In Marx’s basic representation of the circuit:
M – C (LP+MP) … P … C’ – M’(M+m)
M is money capital; C is commodity capital (here composed of labour power and means of production); the dots indicate that the circulation process is interrupted; P is productive capital; C′ again is commodity capital (now the bearer of a capital value which has been valorised, enriched with surplus value) and M’ is again money capital (composed of M, the capital value, and m, the new value, surplus value, realised in money form).
The total social circuit in effect consists of three phases:
· The circuit of money capital, M − C … P … C′ − M′, where the initial and concluding form of the process is that of money capital.
· The circuit of productive capital, P … C’ – M’ – C…P (P′), in which surplus value is created and thereby expanded accumulation becomes possible. It is here that we see the ‘real metamorphosis of capital, as opposed to the merely formal metamorphoses of the circulation sphere’ (1978: 132).
· The circuit of commodity capital, C’ – M′ – C … P … C′ (C”), in which the starting point is commodity capital, the product of a previous production process, already enriched with surplus value.
For our purposes there are two important points which emerge from this very brief overview of the circulation of capital. First, the determining purpose, the driving motive common to all three circuits, is the valorisation of value, the basis of which is the exploitation of labour power. Each particular circuit presupposes the others and although in reality each individual industrial capital is involved in all three at the same time, the circuit is a constant process of interruption as capital clothes itself in its different stages, alternately assuming them and casting them aside (Marx 1978: 109). Hence, capital is simultaneously present and spatially coexistent in its various phases or modes of existence. If however a breakdown occurs in one part of the circuit, the whole process may be brought to a standstill. The cycle of accumulation therefore is fraught with the possibility of crisis at every stage. As Marx indicates:
every delay in the succession brings the coexistence into disarray, every delay in one stage causes a greater or lesser delay in the entire circuit, not only that of the portion of the capital that is delayed, but also that of the entire individual capital.
(1978: 183)
Since the circuitry of modern capitalism is both intensive and extensive (in terms of the interpenetration of capitals and the global domination of this mode of production) the potential for interruption and crisis is immense. Each of the three phases of the total circuit is prone to disruption (in a multitude of ways ranging from financial crisis to industrial unrest and lack of effective demand experienced as ‘overproduction’). At the most basic level the circulation of capital is undermined by any process which potentially reunites labour with the means of production and subsistence. This understanding of capitalism points to the permanence of crisis and the necessity for crisis management at both national and international levels. Every crisis in the international system of course has its own particular line of development. However, by focusing on the circuits of capital we are able to analyse the social form of crisis thereby relating the particular to the general. Finally, this framework establishes a clear break with realist state-centrism and with crude Leninist ‘state as capitalist trust’ theories. As political nodes in the global flow of capital, states are essentially regulative agencies implicated in its reproduction but unable to control this reproduction or represent unambiguously the interests of ‘national capital’. In brief, state managers seek to remove barriers to the accumulation of capital, which flows in and through their territories. The fundamental tasks of state managers (from welfare to the management of money, labour and trade etc.) therefore relate directly to ensuring the successful rotation of capital both nationally and internationally. However, as noted above, the difficulties of containing conflict and enhancing the accumulation of capital have led to a more diverse process of circuit management involving a range of actors, agencies and regimes seeking to regulate aspects of the metamorphosis of capital.
It may not be fashionable to suggest that texts produced in mid-Victorian Britain are the key to understanding the politics of the global economy in the twenty-first century. However, Marx’s theory of capitalist society rooted in the concepts of value, surplus value, capital and class offers a powerful alternative to bourgeois social science which, in his day and ours, seems to offer
nothing more than a didactic and more or less doctrinaire translation of the everyday notions of the actual agents of production … [corresponding] to the self-interest of the dominant classes, since it preaches the natural necessity and perpetual justification of their sources of income and erects this into a dogma.
(Marx 1981: 969)
Notes
1. The term ‘open Marxism’ was first used in this way by Mandel and Agnoli 1980, and has since been systematically developed by Bonefeld et al. 1992; and Holloway 1991, 1995. See also Burnham 1994; Clarke 1988, 1991.
2. For an overview see Anderson 1980.
3. See Bonefeld et al. 1992, Introduction; and Holloway and Picciotto 1977. On autonomous Marxism see Witheford 1994; Cleaver 1979; and Negri 1991. On the CSE see the journal Capital and Class.
4. Also see Burnham 1995a and 1995b.
5. For further details see Corrigan and Sayer 1985; Elton 1974; Loades 1977; Hoskins 1977; Turner 1980; and the various contributors to Hilton 1978.
6. See for instance the early attempts by Kubalkova and Cruickshank 1980; and Thorndike 1978. More recent work includes Linklater 1996; and Rosenberg 1994. For an overview see Smith 1996. On neo-Gramscian IPE, see Cox 1987; and Gill and Law 1988.
7. Also see Holloway 1995.
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