Why do Marxists need a theory of the state?

Given Alan Wolfe’s comments with which this chapter opened, it would not seem unreasonable to expect of those who advance such a theory an answer to the question ‘how precisely does a Marxist theory of the state advance the cause of progressive social transformation’? Yet, unlike, say, their feminist counterparts (Brown 1992; Connell 1990; MacKinnon 1982, 1983, 1985; see also Chapter 6), Marxists have rarely been called upon to offer any such justification for their theoretical endeavours and choices.

Here we can usefully follow the so-called German ‘state-derivationists’. For although their work is in many respects deeply problematic (see Barrow 1993: 94-5; Jessop 1982: 78-101), it certainly served to highlight the centrality of the state to the process of capitalist reproduction. The deriva- tionists, as the label would imply, sought to derive the form and function of the capitalist state from the requirements of the capitalist mode of production. For our purposes we are not concerned to demonstrate, as were they, that the state must by some inexorable inner logic necessarily satisfy such functional requirements, but merely that it is indeed implicated in processes crucial to the reproduction of capitalist relations. Thus, although their perspective can never explain the form and/or (dys)function of the capitalist state, as its advocates believed, it can nonetheless provide us with an exceedingly useful heuristic. For insofar as capitalist social relations are reproduced (and it doesn’t take much insight to see that in the societies we inhabit they are), such functions must indeed be performed by some institution, apparatus, or combination thereof.

So how, precisely, is the capitalist state implicated in the expanded reproduction of capital? Or, to put it another way, what are the functions that must be performed by the state if capitalist social relations are to be reproduced? Numerous aspects of this role can be identified. Taken together they provide ample justification for a distinctively Marxist theory of the state within Marxist theory more generally.

Firstly we might point to the fact that capital is fragmented into a large number of competitive units, yet crucially relies on certain generic conditions being satisfied if surplus value is to be extracted from labour and profit secured (Altvater 1973). The state is, in short, a response to capitalism’s collective action problem. Picture a hypothetical capitalist economy unregulated by the state (the archetypal free market) and comprised inevitably of a multitude of competing capitals. Such an economy is inherently crisis-prone. For no individual capital competing for its very survival will sacrifice its own interest in the general interest. Contradictions or ‘steering problems’ inevitably arise within such an unregulated economy yet can never be resolved. Accordingly they will accumulate until they eventually threaten the very stability of capitalism itself - precipitating a fully-fledged crisis of the mode of production. A capitalist economy without regulation, despite the now pervasive rhetoric of the free-marketeers, is inherently unstable (Aglietta 1979; Habermas 1975; 24-31; Jänicke 1990: 8; Offe 1975; cf.

Now enter the state - as a more-or-less ‘ideal collective capitalist’. Altvater argues that this state must necessarily intervene within the capitalist economy to secure conditions conducive to continuing capitalist accumulation, thereby performing what he calls a ‘general maintenance function’ (1973; Jessop 1982: 90-1). This comprises: (i) the provision of general infrastructure - ‘the material conditions that are necessary to all business activities but that cannot be produced directly [and profitably] by individual private businesses’ (Barrow 1993: 80); (ii) the capacity to defend militarily a national economic space regulated by the state and to preserve an administrative boundary within which the state is sovereign; (iii) the provision of a legal system that establishes and enforces the right to possession of private property and which outlaws practices (such as insider-dealing) potentially damaging to the accumulation of capital within the national economy; and (iv) the inter­vention of the state to regulate and/or ameliorate class struggle and the inevitable conflict between capital and labour.

Such interventions establish what Jürgen Habermas terms the ‘logic of crisis displacement’. By this he means that fundamental crises originating (as ‘steering problems’) within the economy (and which might otherwise have rung the death-knell of capitalism itself) now become the responsi­bility of the state as the supreme regulator of the economy. Crises are thus displaced from the economy (which does not have the internal capacity to resolve them) to the state (which may, or may not). If the state as currently constituted cannot resolve such a crisis, then in the first instance it is the particular form of the capitalist state that is called into question, not the very stability of the capitalist mode of production itself. Consider, for instance, the widely-identified crisis of the late 1970s in Britain. Though precipitated to some extent by economic factors (such as the exhaustion of the post-war ‘Fordist’ mode of economic growth), as the subsequent Thatcherite restructuring demonstrates, this was a crisis of the British state, not of British capitalism per se (see Hay 1996a: Chs 5 and 6).

The implications of this for a Marxist theory of the state are profound. For the state is revealed, once again, as playing a crucial role in safe­guarding the circuit of capital. If we want to understand the operation of the capitalist mode of production we cannot afford to dispense with a theory of the state. Moreover, Habermas’ argument suggests that if we wish to develop a theory of capitalist crisis (an understandably high priority within Marxist theory), then it is to the state that we must turn initially. For economic crises, at least within contemporary capitalism, are likely to become manifest as crises of economic regulation and hence crises of the state. In summary, if we wish to develop insights into the ‘normal’ functioning of the capitalist mode of production, and to the transformation of capitalism in and through moments of crisis, we require a dynamic theory of the capitalist state. It is to the resources we have at our disposal in developing such a theory that we turn in the next section.