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Global Capital, National State, and theInternationalWerner BonefeldVersion of record first published: 19 Mar 2008.

To cite this article: Werner Bonefeld (2008): Global Capital, National State, and the International,Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory, 36:1, 63-72

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Global Capital, National State, and theInternational1

Werner Bonefeld

The article revisits the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) debate on the national

state and the global economy, and concludes with an appeal to internationalism. Its

purpose is to introduce this debate to a new readership. Contemporary analyses of

globalisation and the state tackle issues that were of key importance to this debate*yet

the specific critical insights that the CSE debate brought to the fore are lost in a world in

which ideology is in the process of producing itself. The article argues that regardless of

fashion, these insights are as relevant now as they were then.

Keywords: State; Socialism; Internationalism; Capital and Class

Preface

The following quotations focus well the content and direction of the argument that

I wish to make:

Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it

appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every

means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why?

Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence; too much

industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no

longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on

the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they

are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into

the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The

conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by

them. And how does bourgeois society get over these crises? On the one hand by

enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest

of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.2

1 The article is based on a talk given at the CSE 2006 conference. Originally a set of notes to guide the

presentation, the written version retains its original character but the more obvious jumps and leaps have been

ironed out, and historical references omitted. I am grateful to participants for their comments.2 K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 1997) pp. 18�19.

ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2008 Critique

DOI: 10.1080/03017600801892854

Critique

Vol. 36, No. 1, April 2008, pp. 63�72

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In the same context, the Manifesto speaks about the cosmopolitan character of the

bourgeoisie and defines the state is its executive committee. The two remaining

quotations focus on this:

Although the state is constituted politically on a national basis, its class character is

not defined in national terms, the capitalist law of property and contract

transcending national legal systems, and world money transcending national

currencies.

Above all, the state remains an explicitly capitalist state, not a neutral agency

standing outside of class conflict, and even sophisticated left strategies of working

‘in and against the state’ . . . had little chance of success.3

The Global Economy and the State in the Context of the CSE

In the face of the failure of the Russian Revolution and against the background of

1968, both of Prague and Paris, critical re-assessments of the purpose, role and

function of the state started again in the late 1960s. These reassessments crystallised

first in the critique of orthodox communist ‘stamocap’ theory and drew on themes of

class struggle and social praxis developed earlier by, amongst others, Antonio

Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch. Within the context of the CSE, and drawing

on Peter Burnham, Simon Clarke and Hugo Radice, Marx’s critique of the capitalist

state was well summed up by the ‘old chestnut’ of the state as ‘the executive

committee of the bourgeoisie’. That is to say, the purpose of capital is to make profit,

and the state is the political form of this purpose. Instead of ‘bringing the state back

in’, the CSE argued that the class struggle had to be brought back in to allow for a

proper critical reassessment of the form of the state, its social constitution, role and

purpose.4

In the UK, critical re-examination led first to the Poulantzas/Miliband debate*in

essence, as Radice notes, the structure/agency debate transposed from mainstream

sociology. The CSE contribution to the state debate criticised approaches that

accepted the contingent nature of state�society relations. For the CSE state�society

relations were determined by the form of society, that is, capitalist social relations.

The Poulantzas/Miliband debate only touched the surface. Instead of the Marxian

conception of the social relations of production, the two protagonists were seen to

operate within the traditional confines of bourgeois social theory, according to which

3 S. Clarke, ‘The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form’, in W.

Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds), Open Marxism, Vol.1: Dialectics and History (London: Pluto Press,

1992) p. 136. H. Radice, ‘Globalization, Labour and Socialist Renewal’, Capital & Class, no. 75 (2001), pp. 113�126, cited at p. 118.

4 P. Burnham, ‘Marx, International Political Economy and Globalisation’, Capital & Class, no. 75 (2001),

pp. 103�112. S. Clarke. ‘The State Debate’, in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1991).

H. Radice, ‘The Developmental State under Global Neo-Liberalism: Who is Doing What to Whom’, Paper

presented at Departmental Seminar, Department of Politics, University of York, March 2006.

64 W. Bonefeld

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social theory is either a theory of structures or of social action. Indeed, Simon

Clarke’s seminal contribution showed that both sides of the debate remained locked

in a tradition running from Smith to Weber, basically a conventional social theory

interpretation of Marx that neglected especially the constitutive role played in Marx’s

critique by the theories of value and surplus-value, that is, Marx’s class analysis of

bourgeois economic and political forms.5

At issue was thus the examination of the state, neither as a political derivative of

economic necessity as propounded by orthodox conceptions of economic base and

political superstructure; nor as an objectively given political structure that required

analysis by a Marxist political theory; nor, finally, as an indeterminate thing, which

purpose and content like the proverbial black box is contingent upon, and defined by,

the balance of class forces. The CSE approach conceived of the state as the political

form of bourgeois society. Instead of analyses that emphasise either state over

markets, or markets over state, it understood both*market and state*as forms of

capitalist social relations. This understanding reassessed the state according to themes

of class struggle and social praxis, recovering the critical dimension of the Manifesto’s

denunciation of the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. In terms of

the critique of political economy, the focus on capital as a social relationship

overcame, at least in its critical intension, the orthodox dichotomy between objective

structures and social action by arguing that theoretical mysteries find their rational

explanation in the understanding of human social praxis, however perverted this

praxis might be in the form of the object.

The Early Days

The relationship between state and (global) capital was raised within the context of

the CSE at its very first conference in 1970.6 The flavour of the argument and the

response that it provoked are surprisingly contemporary. Following Clarke’s account,

Robin Murray presented a paper on the internationalisation of capital and the

national state. He argued that the internationalisation of capital had undermined

the ability of the state to regulate the national economy according. Theoretically, his

take on internationalisation and national state was captured by the idea of a

‘territorial non-coincidence’ between (global) capital and (national) state. The

economy was seen to have de-nationalised itself qua inter-nationalisation, and this

process was seen to have diminished the capacity of the state to regulate ‘its’ national

economy in a socially comprehensive way. Instead, internationalisation of capital

asserted the limits of accumulation upon the national state form, restricting the

democratic element of the liberal-democratic state to its liberal foundation. Simply

5 H. Radice, op. cit. S. Clarke, ‘Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzas’s Theory of the State’, in S. Clarke (ed.),

The State Debate, op. cit. On the two social theories, see V. Vanberg, Die beiden Soziologien (Tubingen: Mohr,

1975).6 This part draws on S. Clarke, ‘The State Debate . . .’, op. cit.

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put, internationalisation led to the retreat of social democratic state and favoured the

emergence of the neo-liberal state.

Robin Murray’s notion of the territorial non-coincides between state and economy

build on Kindelberger’s argument that the national state was ‘just about through as

an economic unit’.7 He, too, argued that the economy had internationalised, and

internationalisation compromised the economic capacity of the state. Internationa-

lisation was characterised by the world-wide operation and thus global reach and

influence, of what were then called transnational companies (TNCs).8 Research into

TNCs*not multinational corporations (MNCs), this term came later*developed

into a growth industry during the 1970s, and inspired the creation of a specialised

agency, the Commission of Trans-national Corporations to look into matters of law,

regulation, and taxation.9 To sum up, the apparent internationalisation of capital led

Murray to pose the question whether national states will continue to be the primary

structure within the international economic system, or whether the expanded

territorial range of capitalist production will require the parallel expansion of

coordinating state functions.10 In today’s language, Murray’s demand for the

expansion of state functions is discussed either in terms of the need for a

cosmopolitan re-organisation of social democracy or in terms of the creation of

supranational ‘governance mechanisms’ that provide an institutional anchor for

national Keynesian responses to neo-liberal globalisation.11 Many of today’s

discussions on globalisation appear strangely removed from these earlier attempts

at conceptualisation. In fact, conventionally contemporary globalisation is contrasted

to the regime of a triumphant national Fordism of early 1970s, and the argument is

about distinct periods of capitalism, one marked by its national organisation, the

other by its ‘discovery’ of the world market. Capitalism is, of course, a very dynamic

system and is in the process of constant change. However, discovery of new capitalist

regimes, and their periodic transition from one to the other, suggests a shrinking of

historical consciousness. Such shrinking is linked with the principle of progress in

bourgeois society. It justifies forgetfulness and justifies what is forgotten.

The internationalisation thesis of the 1970s pointed critical analysis in the right

direction, but akin to today’s conception of a new capitalist period, it remained

7 C. Kindelberger, American Business Abroad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 207.8 Compared with A. E. Berle, The 20th Century’s Capitalist Revolution (New York: Brace, 1954),

Kindelberger’s view was neither original nor ‘radical’ in its conclusions. Berle’s study suggested that

government should be run by private firms since they are bigger than government, and have at their disposal

greater resources in the form of a skilled, experienced and therefore efficient and effective ‘service-providers’ who

know that time is money. On Berle, see J. Agnoli, ‘The Market, the State, and the End of History’, in W. Bonefeld

and K. Psychopedis (eds) The Politics of Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).9 Kees van der Pijl’s influential research into transnational class relations captured these developments in

theoretical terms. See K. van der Pijl, ‘Class Formation at the International Level’, Capital & Class, no. 9 (1979),

pp. 1�21.10 On this see P. Murray, as cited in S. Picciotto, ‘The Internationalisation of Capital and the International

State System’, in S. Clarke (ed) The State Debate, op. cit., p. 214.11 Cf. D. Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge:

Polity, 2004), and D. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).

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fundamentally flawed. First, it was based on the assumption that state and capital are

two distinct forms of social organisation, one of which determines the other. In this

view, the ‘deterritorialisation’ of capital entails the subordination of the state to

capitalist interests, to the detriment of the state’s ‘relative’ autonomy vis-a-vis the

economic*it seems as if internationalisation made the state fully capitalist. Then

there is, second, the assumption that prior to internationalisation, capital really was a

national thing, under the wings of the national state and subject to democratic forms

of accountability and regulation. That is to say, prior to internationalisation the state

appears to have been more than just a capitalist state. Internationalisation of capital is

thus treated as a break in the history of capitalism, from a national, state-centred

capitalist formation to an international capitalism, in which the state, in the words of

Robert Cox, transformed from an agency primarily concerned with the provision of

welfare into a transmission belt, and thus a mere instrument, of global capitalist

interests.12 Finally, in contradiction to the critical intention of the approach, the

internationalisation of capital remained in fact a ‘state-centred’ affair! Internationa-

lisation conceived of the world market as a system of ‘inter-national’ economic

relations, suggesting that the world market was the sum of many national economies,

which related to each other in the form of ‘complex interdependency’ where each

economy was seen to ‘inter-penetrate’ the other. The ‘inter-nationalisation’ of capital

could thus be seen to amount either to a modern form of mercantilism or to a

complex system of interdependent and interpenetrating ‘national capitalisms’.13

Subsequent developments were seen to favour the latter view: ‘globalisation’ studies

fed on each other, including those conducted by globalisation sceptics who argued

that globalisation dependent on the assertion of state power and who therefore

argued in favoured of state-led, national alternatives to ‘neo-liberal’ globalisation.14

The distinctiveness of the CSE approach is in part due to the way in which it

developed the notion of ‘internationalisation’. As Simon Clarke put it, ‘capital tries to

overcome the barrier of the limited domestic market by seeking out markets on a

global scale’. That is to say, global markets are the condition of domestic markets, and

vice versa. Indeed, ‘capital was from its birth a global power’. Both, the establishment

of the national state and the world market, were products of the same social struggles

that revolutionised feudal social relations. In this way, then, ‘the question of the

national integration of the state could not be divorced from that of the integration of

12 R. Cox, ‘Global Perestroika’, in R. Miliband and L. Panitch (eds) The Socialist Register: New World Order?

(London: Merlin Press, 1992). For critique, see P. Burnham, ‘Globalization, Depoliticization and ‘‘Modern’’

Economic Management’, in W. Bonefeld and K. Psychopedis (eds) The Politics of Change, op. cit. See also the

debate in A. Bieler et al., Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour (London: Palgrave, 2006).13 J. Hirsch, Kapitalismus ohne Alternative (Hamburg: VSA, 1989), p. 92, emphasis added.14 More recently, mercantilist visions of a world of trading states have reasserted themselves in the face of the

apparent revival of states as the primary agents in world politics, be it in the form of US imperialism, China’s

‘state-based’ search for raw materials as a challenge to market-based globalization, or the apparent failure of a

supranational EU. The pendulum continues to swing from market to state and from state to market. Just like

Say’s law, where demand explains supply, and conversely, supply explains demand, the argument moves in

circles. The state points to the market, and the market points to the state, none is explained.

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the international state system’.15 Picciotto argued that the emergence of the national

state ‘originated as an international system of states’16*a ‘system’ of inter-state

relations that, as Marx had argued, is founded on: ‘the international relations of

production. International division of labour. International exchange and import.

Rate of exchange’.17 Furthermore, this inter-state system was, from its inception,

embedded within the ‘global context of production and exchange’. In other words, the

‘world market is integrated into the national economy’.18 In short, the CSE

approached state and economy as distinct forms of the same fundamental relations

of production, and argued that the world market subsists, from its inception, in and

through the territory of states.19

‘Just what national alternative [is] there to the neo-liberal orthodoxy’?20

Following Clarke’s account, Murray’s point that the internationalisation of capital

diminishes the relative autonomy of the national state was criticised most notably by

Bill Warren.21 He argued that internationalisation did not effect the autonomy of the

state, that the class character of the state was structurally determined, and predicted

that ‘central bankers, international organisations and State policy-making bodies

[would soon] chain down the Euro-dollar monster so that it is no longer available to

do the bidding of the large firms’.22 Warren seemed to have identified capital with

productive capital and capitalist accumulation with productive accumulation,

rejecting monetary accumulation as parasitic. His prophecy was repeated some 18

years later by Austin Mitchell, who argued that the state will make ‘money its servant’

so that it is ‘put to work for growth and jobs rather than the selfish purposes of the

merchants of greed’.23 Now, almost 20 years after Mitchell, the prophecy still holds,

from Stiglitz via Tobin to Panitch.

Whatever the political differences between Warren and Mitchell, both agree that

the state has the power to tackle what today is called neo-liberal, financial

globalization in favour of productive accumulation*‘economic growth and jobs’.

This conception of the power of the national state still holds sway today. The*undisputed*circumstance that the global economy depends on the assertion of state

15 S. Clarke, Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State (Aldershot: Edward and Elgar, 1988),

pp. 143, 178, 179.16 S. Picciotto, op. cit., p. 218.17 K. Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 108.18 C. von Braunmuhl, ‘On the Analysis of the Capitalist Nation State within the World Market Context’, in J.

Holloway and S. Picciotto (eds) State and Capital (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), pp. 163, 168.19 For recent elaborations, see P. Burnham, ‘Capital, Crisis and the International State System’, and J.

Holloway, ‘Global Capital and the National State’, both in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds) Global Capital,

National State and the Politics of Money (London: Palgrave, 1996). See also W. Bonefeld, ‘The Spectre of

Globalisation’, in W. Bonefeld and K. Psychopedis, op. cit.20 H. Radice, ‘Globalization, Labour . . .’, op. cit., p. 118.21 S. Clarke, ‘The State Debate’, op. cit.22 B. Warren, cited in S. Picciotto, op. cit., pp. 214�215.23 A. Mitchell, Competitive Socialism (London: Unwin, 1989), p. 61.

68 W. Bonefeld

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power, is taken to mean that the struggle for state power is paramount in order to

combat neo-liberal capitalism. According to this view, the so-called decline in

the power of the national state has been exaggerated to favour specific class interests.

The state operates forcefully to advance these interests and, since its power is

undiminished, it remains the pre-eminent instrument for social change. As Leo

Panitch sees it, rather than leaving the state to operate as an efficient agency

for capitalist globalization, the left needs to struggle for the state in an attempt

to transform it into a creative agency of cooperation, decommodification and

democratization.24 It really is unfortunate that political analyses and demands

for socialist transformation remain typically ‘national’ in their focus. It is equally

unfortunate that many broadly progressive writers downplay the significance of

globalisation in favour of a political strategy that Radice has rightly labelled as

‘progressive nationalism’.25 The espousal of the national state as an instrument

of socialist transformation abstracts from the form of the state and instead suggests

that the capitalist state is neo-liberal because the balance of class forces in favour of

‘neo-liberal’ globalisation defines it as such.

One of the most consistent socialist critics of neo-liberal globalisation has been Leo

Panitch. He urges the Left to ‘reorient strategic discussions . . . towards the

transformation of the state’, to achieve ‘a radical redistribution of productive

resources, income and working time’. For this to occur, a change in the balance of

class forces is essential. Furthermore, the ‘social-democratic transformation of the

state’ requires a ‘shift towards a more inwardly oriented economy’.26 He envisages a

form of economic development that combines national protectionism with economic

planning and redistribution of wealth from capital to labour. His socialist version of a

national economy appears persuasive*yet appearances are often deceptive and on

closer inspection tend to reveal themselves as myth.27

To his credit, Leo Panitch is at least clear about the desired outcome of his state-

centred anti-globalisation demands. In the work of, say, Hirst and Thompson, and

Linda Weiss, labour is conspicuous by its absence. According to Weiss, state capacity

remains vital for economic modernisation, and central to its success. National

competitiveness is seen to be dependent on the state either in the form of, for

example, the neo-liberal state of Anglo-Saxon capitalism or the corporatist state of

Rhineland capitalism. Hirst and Thompson envisage a supranationally anchored and

coordinated national modernisation strategy that combats neo-liberal globalisation in

favour of a politically controlled and democratically balanced modernisation of

economic relations. These authors thus agree with Hirsch that globalisation has

24 L. Panitch, ‘ ‘‘The State in a Changing World’’: Social-Democratizing Global Capitalism?’, Monthly Review,

50:5 (1998).25 H. Radice, ‘Responses to Globalization: A Critique of Progressive Nationalism’, New Political Economy, 5:1

(2000), pp. 5�19.26 L. Panitch, ‘Globalisation and the State’, in L. Panitch and R. Miliband (eds) The Socialist Register (London:

Merlin Press, 1994), pp. 87, 89. L. Panitch, ‘The New Imperial State’, New Left Review, no. 2 (March�April 2000),

pp. 5�20.27 See H. Radice, ‘The National Economy: A Keynesian Myth?’, Capital & Class, no. 22 (1984), pp. 111�140.

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forced the state to become a ‘competition state’*itself a highly dubious concept since

it suggests that capitalist states’ primary occupation in the past was not to ensure

economic competitiveness.28 Weiss argues for a differential approach: in order to

retain competitiveness, different states adopt distinct modernisation strategies,

depending on their respective socio-economic structures of development; Hirst and

Thompson argue that modernisation cannot be to the self-destructive forces of the

market but needs to be regulated by the good offices of the state to secure its viability

and democratic legitimacy; and Panitch argues for the ‘social-democratisation of

capitalism’ by means of a change in the balance of class forces. He does not conceive

of the state as the political form of capitalist social relations but sees it as an objective

field of tension between distinct social interests, and it is the struggle between these

interests that decides state purpose. That is, the state is conceived as a sort of political

opportunity structure that social interests struggle to define to advance their specific

interests. However, although state purpose is thus defined by the*always con-

tingent*balance of class forces, there needs to be a balance between them. For this

reason, the state is not just a field of opportunity inasmuch as capital is seen to put a

structural constraint on the state*however, thus, the class forces might define state

purpose, the economic determines in the last instance. What, then, is the content and

scope of a social democratic capitalism?

There is no doubt that honest and sincere pursuit of social democratic reform can

improve conditions. Humanisation of inhuman conditions points the struggle for

socialism in the right direction*but paradoxically, it is also self-contradictory. The

humanising effort presupposes as eternal those same inhuman conditions that

provoke the humanising effort in the first place. The CSE debate on the state focused

this paradox well. It argued that the ‘social democratic theory of the state . . . focused

on the institutional separation of the state from the economy, and so stressed the

autonomy of the state as a political institution. This analytical separation of the

‘‘political’’ from the ‘‘economic’’ was based theoretically on a radical separation of

production from distribution’.29 Thus, and following Clarke, the capitalist concern

for profit transformed into the national interest in economic growth. A social

democratic policy of re-distribution and full employment depends on economic

growth, and thus on an internationally competitive domestic economy. There can be

no redistribution of wealth without the production of wealth qua exploitation and

that is, redistribution of wealth presupposes the product of labour as the property of

capital. In other words, the social democratic policy of distribution translates the

demand for employment and social security into a politics of economic growth, and

that is, into pressure on the state to facilitate the increase in the rate of accumulation.

Thus, the working class remains ‘always the object of state power. The judicial power

of the state stands behind the appropriation of labour without equivalent by the

28 L. Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). D. Hirst and G. Thompson,

Globalisation . . ., op. cit. J. Hirsch, ‘Globalisation of Capital, Nation-States and Democracy’, Studies in Political

Economy, no. 54 (1997), pp. 39�58.29 S. Clarke, ‘The State Debate . . .’, op. cit, pp. 3�4.

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capitalist class, while preventing the working class from using its collective power to

assert the right to the product of its labour’.30 In sum, the purpose of the form of the

state is entailed in its bourgeois character, that is, to ‘govern over the labour force’.31

The old chestnut of the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie sums this

up well.

Conclusion

My conclusion is in the form of an appeal to internationalism. The attempt to hold

the international division of labour down to the national division of labour is most

dangerous and disarms the Left. This conception of socialism as a national affair

‘reflects one of the most powerful legacies of the twentieth-century political and

economic thinking: the theory of ‘‘socialism in one country’’’.32 The last century has

taught us many lessons. Chief among them is that socialism can only mean

internationalism. The national division of labour presupposes the international

division of labour and national protectionism amounts to a defence within, not

against, the world market. Capitalist social relations are always already world market

relations.

The realities of globalisation should not be attacked as an ideology that masks the

enduring capacity of the state to reform or transform capitalism. Nor should the

world market society of capital be seen as an ‘inter-national’ economic order in which

the rich countries exploit the poor countries. Neo-mercantilist imperialism is indeed

a real force in the expansion of capitalist reproduction through dispossession

supported by means of military direction. Then as now, Marx’s insight that ‘a great

deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without certificate of birth,

was yesterday, in England, the capitalized blood of children’, remains a powerful

judgment of contemporary conditions.33 That is to say, neo-imperialism cannot be

understood in abstraction from global capitalist class relations. It is, of course,

politically easy for a ‘peripheral’ bourgeoisie to ‘suppress internal revolt by blaming

the continuation of imperialist forms of domination of their countries’, and in doing

so to masks ‘their own complicity in this domination’.34 There is thus need for a

realistic conception of the struggle for human emancipation, a conception that does

not succumb to the imagery of the form of the state as a potential force of national

liberation against the exigencies of global capitalist interests, and that, instead,

rediscovers class struggle as a laboratory of the communist individual.35

30 S. Clarke, ‘State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital’, in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate, op.

cit, p. 198.31 J. Hirsch, op. cit., p. 47.32 H. Radice, ‘Globalization . . .’, op. cit., p. 113.33 K. Marx, Capital, vol. I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 707.34 A. Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Post-Colonial World (London: Palgrave, 1997), p. 49.35 On this, see W. Bonefeld, ‘The Capitalist State: Illusion and Critique’, in W. Bonefeld (ed.) Revolutionary

Writing (New York: Autonomedia, 2003).

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We must therefore not only ‘attain to a conception of history that is in keeping

with [the] insight’ that ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘‘state of

emergency’’ in which we live, is not the exception but the rule’.36 We must also

develop a conception of struggle that understands that the ‘everyday struggle over the

production and appropriation of surplus value in every individual workplace and

every local community . . . is the basis of the class struggle on a global scale’.37 Cutting

struggle down to the national level as the basic, given unit of the inter-national order

coerces the global character of this struggle, divides it in the form of competing

territorial units, and thus treats them as competing factors of production that can

also be called upon as a military resource. Proletarian internationalism is the only

answer to (neo-)liberalism, especially against the background of its political crisis.

Paraphrasing Simon Clarke one more time, if the prospect of dictatorship, populist

nationalism and war seems unlikely now, it seemed equally unlikely some 100 years

ago, and more likely today than only yesterday.

Postscript

The critique of neo-liberalism is necessary. However, this critique should not be

reduced to a critique in favour of the national state as an instrument of democratic

renewal against neo-liberalism.38 The capitalist state, however nationally maintained,

transnationalised, or ‘spaced out’, is fundamentally a liberal state.39 That is to say, the

critique of the world market society of capital has also to be a critique of its political

form. In short, all who live from their labour and the sale of their labour power ‘find

themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which

society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State; in

order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State’.40

The communist individual is not something that can be decreed by the force of law,

the state. The form of the state presupposes the separation of the mass of the

population from the means of production. This separation is the social basis on

which capital and its political form, the state, rests. A society where the free

development of each is the condition for the free development of all, cannot rest on

this separation. It is this separation that renders human productive power a

commodity, and it this separation that the communist individual subverts in her

struggle for a human world.

36 W. Benjamin, ‘Geschichtsphilosphische Thesen’ in Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsatze (Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1965), p. 84.37 S. Clarke, ‘Class Struggle and the Global Overaccumulation of Capital’, in R. Albritton et al. (eds), Phases of

Capitalist Development, (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 90�91.38 On this see W. Bonefeld, ‘Anti-Globalization and the Question of Socialism’, Critique, 34:1 (2006),

pp. 39�59, and W. Bonefeld, ‘Die Zeit der Transformation’, AK � Zeitung (Berlin/Hamburg), no. 515, 16 March

2007, p. 31.39 Cf. N. Brenner, New State Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).40 K. Marx and F. Engels, Die deutsche Ideology, MEW 3 (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), p. 77.

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