Political Sociology of the Capitalist State and Globalization: An Appraisal of Recent Neo-Marxist Contributions

Bipul Kumar Bhadra

I. INTRODUCTION:

Technology makes possible the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever-expanding set of human desires. This process guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances. All countries undergoing economic modernization must increasing resemble one another: they must unify nationally on the basis of a centralized state, urbanize, replace traditional forms of social organization like tribe, sect, and family with economically rational ones based on function and efficiency, and provide for the universal education of their citizens... . Moreover, the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism… .The social changes that accompany advanced industrialization, in particular universal education, appear to liberate a certain demand for recognition that did not exist among poorer and less educated people. As standards of living increase, as populations become more cosmopolitan and better educated, and as society as a whole achieves a greater equality of condition, people begin to demand not simply more wealth but recognition of their status… . Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy because of the realization that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition. Francis Fukuyama 1

In the present paper I propose to focus on the recent Marxist contributions on two

principal but related issues: the capitalist state, or rather capitalist type of state, and

globalization. The first issue deals with three important aspects concerning the

capitalist state, its organization and functions. These are the role of the capitalist

state in generating and reproducing social cohesion between or among antagonistic

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social classes and their fractions, the relative autonomy of the capitalist state in

relation to the politically and economically dominant or ruling class and, finally, the

issue of the state intervention in the capitalist accumulation and social reproduction

at both national and global levels. The main burden of this paper, in the first

instance, is therefore to highlight the contributions of a few of the recent neo-

Marxist theorists to these aspects in the light of the views of the classical Marxist

theorists such as Marx, Engels and Lenin.2 In doing so, however, I propose also to

stress not only the general functions of the capitalist state,3 but also, though briefly,

undertake a brief review of the more recent Marxist theorists on the capitalist state

and its relation to, among other things, to the globalization process, which I take up

as the second theme of my discourse in the present paper.

A caveat, rather limitation, concerning the two principal issues of this paper

in this regard may be mentioned at the very outset. In the relevant contemporary

literature a number of societal issues have been probelmatized and analyzed, and

they have seized the attention of numerous social scientists belonging to various

disciplines. These other issues are, for instance, the relationship of the state to the

national and global civil society, the role of social capital in general and in

promoting social cohesion, political participation and strengthening democracy in

particular, impact of the rise of the Information and Communications Technologies

(ICTs) in all conceivable spheres of life including concerns like digital divide or e-

governance, women’s empowerment vis-à-vis the patriarchal character of the

contemporary capitalist state, and so on. Suffice it to stress that all these concerns,

along with others including globalization, are quite important in themselves and

need no special exertion to covey the urgency of undertaking serious studies,

research and debates for dealing with them. Having said this, I need to emphasize

further that the rationale behind the choice of afore-mentioned themes in the

present discourse. This importance of the communication on the nature and

functions the capitalist state is, in the last instance, such that this issue concerning

the capitalist state needs to be analyzed and understood before one can productively

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engage with other issues, for the latter are integrally and vitally connected with the

former, regardless of the developmental conditions of the society in which the

capitalist state is embedded. 4

It may generally be said that the capitalist state functions to maintain the

unity and cohesion of the social formation and thereby reproduces the conditions of

reproduction and accumulation on an ever-increasing scale. The capitalist state

cannot reproduce the conditions of extended production and accumulation of

capital unless it in the first place maintains the unity and cohesion of the social

formation. This is to say that the state maintains the social formation by not

allowing either the social formation to crumble or the struggling classes to consume

themselves by mutually destroying each other.5 Herein lies the importance of the

factor of social cohesion or harmony between the classes which are intrinsically

antagonistic relationally in Marxist conceptual terms. In creating and maintaining

the conditions of profitable accumulation and social reproduction, the capitalist

state detaches itself from the capitalist class and its fractions and presents itself as a

“neutral” agency or as a representative of “general interest” of all or different rival

social classes in a social formation dominated by the capitalist mode of production

(abbreviated hereafter as CMP). This is to say that the capitalist state asserts

relative autonomy vis-à-vis the politically dominant classes and fractions in its

presentation as the representative of the “universal interests” of all people .6 Now, it

can be said that by maintaining social cohesion or harmony between different social

classes, on the one hand, and by asserting its relative autonomy, on the other, the

capitalist state creates and maintains the conditions of ever-growing production,

reproduction and accumulation. At one and the same time, the capitalist state’s

interventionist role emerges in its function to reproduce such conditions of

valorization of capital and social reproduction.7

Before proceeding any further, it is only in the fitness of things that I must

acknowledge that World Development Report 1997 rightly focused on the role and

effectiveness of the state, especially in respect of achieving sustainable growth and

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development. No less important is the fact that previously there has been a revival

and proliferation of the theoretical and empirical discourses on the various aspects

of the contemporary state, and especially capitalist state, in different social scientific

disciplines since the 1970s.The issues of the role and functional limits of capitalist

state were high on the agenda not only in different disciplines but also in both

developing and developed societies in their searches for optimal ways and means for

accelerating sustainable economic growth and development. The state was and still

is indeed in the spotlight, especially in the contexts of, among other things,

sustainable development, and gender dimensions of political power, and

globalization which constitutes my other theme in the paper. The reasons behind

rekindling of academic interest in the studies and research on the state are quite

numerous in fact: the failure of the state-dominated economic development in most

developing societies, the rise of the developmental state that acts as a facilitator and

catalyst for encouraging and reinvigorating the private sector entrepreneurialism

as evidenced in the postwar economic growth "miracles" in East Asia, the collapse

of command-and-control economies in the former Soviet Union and Central and

Eastern Europe, the fiscal crisis of the welfare state in most of the industrialized

societies, the collapse of certain states and the corresponding explosion in

humanitarian emergencies in many parts of the world.8 Before taking on the

proposed themes of the paper, some methodological observations that constitute

signposts of my discourse are in order.9

II A BRIEF METHODOLOGICAL EXCURSUS:

First, a social formation (or society) can be conceived as a structures10 whole or

totality, constituted principally of the economic, political and ideological instances

and characterized by a complex unity. The Marxist conception of totality should be

distinguished from the Hegelian conception of totality which is expressive totality,

that is, “a totality of all whose parts are so many ‘total parts’, each expressing the

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others, and each expressing the social totality that contains them, because each in

itself contains in the immediate from of its expression the essence of the totality

itself.”11 In brief, the Hegelian conception expresses a “simple unity”.12 In contrast,

the Marxist totality neither indicates equivalence of its elements nor stresses one

element as the epiphenomenon of any of them.

Second, both Marx13 and Engels14 conceived the social formation in terms of

a metaphor of an edifice whose upper floors (the legal-political and ideological

superstructures) rest on its foundation (the economic base or infrastructure). That is

to say, the superstructural instances are not reducible to the base, or to any common

underlying principle, and the base, in its turn, does not simply push forward or pull

along the superstructure. Marx and Engels conceived the complex totality of the

social formation in terms of the base-superstructure couple, according to which one

instance determines itself, the other instances, and the totality, as it is at the same

time affected by these other instances.15 In this conception of the relationship

between the instances in the structure-superstructure refer to “two ends of the

chain”. In this chain the determination in the last instance by the (economic) mode

of production and the relative autonomy of the juridico-political and the ideological

superstructures with their respective effectivity indicate “what goes on between

them.”16

Third, there are three invariant economic elements which combine in a

double relation in a given mode of production.17 The three elements are: (1) The

laborer, ‘the direct producer’, i.e., labor power, (2) The means of production, i.e.,

the object and the means of labor; and (3) The non-labor who appropriates the

surplus labor, i.e., the product. These elements, constituting the economic in a mode

of production exist in a specific combination which is itself composed of a double

relationship:

(A) A relation of real appropriation (sometimes Marx calls it possession)

which refers to the relation of the laborer to the means of production, i.e., to the

labor process, or to the system of productive forces. In class divided societies, this

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form of relation can set up either, as in the case of the pre-capitalist modes of

production, a union of the laborer with the means of production, or, as in the case of

the capitalist mode of production, a separation of the laborer from the means of

production.

(B) A relation of property which makes it possible for the non-laborer

to intervene as owner either of the means of production or of the labor

power, or of both. This relation defines strictly the relations of production.

The relation of property (not of course, juridical property) always sets up,

in class divided societies, a ‘separation’ of the laborer from the means of

labor. The means of labor are the property of the non-laborer who, as

owner, appropriates the surplus labor.

These two afore-mentioned relations, i.e., a relation of real

appropriation and a relation of property, belong to “a unique and variable

combination which constitutes the economic in a mode of production, the

combination of the system of productive forces with the system of relations

of production. In the combination characteristic of the CMP, two relations

are homologous. The separation in the relation of property coincides with

the separation in the relation of real appropriation.” 18 In brief, the

determination of a mode of production by the economic in the last instance

depends on the forms which the combination in question takes on. The

concept and process of (capitalist) accumulation or self-valorization of

capital can be explained in the words of Jessop:

Self valorization is the process by which capital expands through the profitable reinvestment of past profits. This occurs through the repeated self-transformation of capital as it passes through the circuit of capital. This begins with the stage of money capital, when money as capital is used to purchase materials, means of production and labor-power, which are then combined in a production process through which value is added (the stage of productive capital). Capitalist production involves not only the material transformation of nature to add use-value but also the valorization of capital through the successful appropriation of any exchange-value added by the socially

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necessary labor time expended during the production process. Any exchange-value so created is only realized, however, by selling these commodities at a profit for money as revenue (the stage of commercial capital). Such sales are not guaranteed. The circuit is completed and renewed with the reinvestment – in the same and/or other areas of production – of the initial capital as augmented by part or all of this profit.19

The instance of the political refers to the juridico-political superstructure

of the state.20 The functions that the capitalist state does are numerous but

temporally and spatially contextual and contingent conditions depending on

the balance of class forces in the given CMP. In Table 1 Jessop provides a

generalized description of the functions of the capitalist or rather capitalist

type of state. The ideological instance can be stated as referring to a

coherent ensemble or representations, values, beliefs, myths, etc. They

reflect men’s actual relations to their (men’s) conditions of existence in the

form of imaginary relation.21

Finally, a characteristic feature of the CMP, as Marx has shown both

in the Grundrisse and in the Capital, is the relative autonomy, specific to

the economic (unity of the labor process and the relations of production)

and political instances. This is to say that the capitalist state has its relative

autonomy relative to the economic. In the CMP, the capitalist relations of

production (i.e. separation of the direct producer from the means of

production within the framework of the relations of real appropriation)

produce the specific autonomy of the political and the economic. It assigns

to the juridico-political superstructure a relative autonomy. Again, it

necessitates a juridical system which formalizes the distribution of the

means of production by setting up agents of production as juridical

subjects/ political persons. The specific autonomy of the political and the

economic structures in the CMP is reflected, in the field of class struggle

(the field of social relations), as the autonomy of the economic class

struggle (socio-economic relations) vis-à-vis the political class struggle

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Table No. 1Some functions of the capitalist type of state

1 Securing the general external conditions for capital accumulation, such as a formally rational legal order and protection of property rights.

2

Securing the fictitious commodification of land, money, labor power and knowledge and modulating their subsequent de- and recommodification in the light of the changing forms of appearance of capital’s structural contradictions and strategic dilemmas and of the changing balance of forces contesting the extent and consequences of such fictitious commodification. In relation to labor-power, this involves managing the supply of labor-power, labor markets and the terms of employment within the labor process.

3Securing the rights and capacities of capital to control labor power in the production process and regulating the terms and conditions of the capital–labor relation in the labor market and labor process.

4

Defining the boundaries between the economic and extra-economic and modifying the links between the economic and extra-economic preconditions of capital accumulation in the light of changing materially and discursively constituted forms of competition and in the light of resistance to the colonization of the extra-economic by the logic of capital.

5Promoting the provision of the general conditions of production, especially capital-intensive infrastructure with a long turnover time, appropriate to a given stage and/or variety of capitalism.

6Managing the fundamental contradiction between the increasingly social nature of productive forces and the continuing private and competitive nature of the social relations of production and the appropriation of surplus labor.

7Articulating the interlinked processes of de- and reterritorialization and de- and retemporalization associated with the remaking of the spatio-temporal fixes necessary for relatively stable periods of accumulation.

8Addressing the wider political and social repercussions of the changing forms of appearance of capitalist contradictions and dilemmas as these are mediated in and through specific forms of political organization and social mobilization.

Source: Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, p. 45.

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(socio-political relations). Now, the relation between the capitalist state

and the economic class struggle may be noted. In the CMP, the complex

functioning of the juridical and ideological instances produces what may be

called an “effect of isolation” on the economic class struggle, i.e., the effect

of concealing from the agents of production distributed in social classes

that their relations are class relations. 22 It conceals from the agents their

class relations in their economic class struggle. The capitalist state appears

vis-à-vis the economic class struggle as a political unity of an economic

class struggle. It presents itself as the representative of the “general

interests” of competing economic interests, whereas in fact the capitalist

state is founded on the isolation of socio-economic relations (the economic

class struggle).23 Let me know pass on to the themes of this paper.

III. COHESION BETWEEN THE CLASSES: THE ROLE OF THE CAPITALIST STATE

By cohesion, as applied to the politically dominant and dominated

classes or fractions, I would refer to the processes involving such elements

or forces which draw and keep these classes or fractions thereof

together.24 In respect of cohesion between the classes or, alternatively

speaking, social harmony between them, recent contributions of Gramsci

and O’Connor are significant in as much as they have focused on this new

role of the capitalist state.25 This is to say that an aspect of the recent

contributions to the Marxist theory of the capitalist state is the emphasis

accorded to the factor of cohesion or social harmony between otherwise

antagonistic classes.

In the classic conception, as developed by Marx, Engels and Lenin,

the state is conceived above all as the coercive or repressive apparatus. 26 In

a social formation in which there exists irreconcilable antagonism of

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economic interests between social classes, the state as a repressive medium

holds this class antagonism in check and thus enables the ruling class to

ensure their class domination.27 Moreover, Marx and Engels conclude that

the executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee to manage the

common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. 28

As already indicated, the state is mainly conceived as coercive

‘machine’ or ‘instrument’ of class domination. Marx, in his The Civil War

in France (1871), refers to the state power as “a public force organized for

social enslavement” or as “an engine” of class despotism. 29 Elsewhere, in

the same work, he speaks of the state as the “horrid machinery of class

domination itself”, or as “the organized general organ” of the ruling

classes’ domination, or as “an instrument” of class rule. 30 Thus Sanderson

remarks that

the state was for Marx essentially coercive. It was, he held in the first volume of Capital; “the concentrated and organized force of society”; It settled disputes between the classes within a society, but settlement does not mean reconciliation: it means oppression of the nonruling classes and the oppression becomes the more ferocious as the disputes become increasingly acrimonious. The state also, it would seem, tends to become more powerful and to present the appearance of being in some sense apart from society, dominating it. This is the case particularly in modern industrial society where the numbers of its employees are greatly increased, the class struggles with which it has to cope are more serious, and the weapons at its disposal prove more lethal.31

Engels shares the same view as to the coercive nature of the state. He refers

to it, in 1891, as “nothing but a machine for oppression of one class by

another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the

monarchy.32 Finally, for Lenin the state is not only “a machine for

maintaining the rule of one class over another” 33 but also a “special

machine for the suppression of one class by another, and, what is more, of

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the majority by the minority.34 The state in this classic conception emerges,

thus, as a coercive and repressive apparatus. 35

What is the role of the ruling ideas – ideas which are “ideal

expression of the dominant material relationships” or “the dominant

material relationships grasped as ideas” – when the state is involved in a

contradiction between the particular class interest and the so-called

universal interests of all people? Marx and Engels answer that this

contradiction could be resolved by representation of the particular class

interest as the universal interest provided the ruling class succeeds to

universalize their ideas as the ruling ideas. That is to say, the ruling class

has to give “its ideas the form of universality and represent them as the

only rational, universally valid ideas.” 36 The ruling class rules also as

“thinkers, producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution

of the ideas of their age; thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the

epoch.”37 It is needless to say that the main function of the ruling ideas is to

mask the domination of the governing classes.

It is thus apparent that the factor of cohesion or social harmony is

significantly absent in the classical conception. In this respect Gramsci’s

work represents a notable break with this tradition. 38 His contribution

consists in the suggestion that class domination in the capitalist social

formation is not based on coercion only, which, of course, is the primary

function of the state, but also on consent which the dominant classes and

their fractions secure from the dominated classes and their fractions. This

is how cohesion or social harmony between opposed classes is maintained.

Gramsci refer to what can be called hegemonic domination of the dominant

classes and fractions. With the help of his concept of hegemony he drew

attention to the factor of cohesion and also to the two modalities of power

relations of the capitalist state. The function of coercion is thus

complemented by that of hegemony i.e., dominant classes’ leadership based

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on the consent of the led. Hegemony brings about consent and persuasion as

mechanisms of political legitimation and social integration among the dominated

classes. Before I go on to discuss how consent, which becomes the factor of

cohesion or social harmony, is secured by means of the hegemony of the

dominant classes, let me make the following observation.

The most important issue is what has been called “the site of the

struggle for hegemony,”39 whether in the state or civil society. Generally

speaking, for Gramsci, civil society stands for all private organizations such as

churches, trade unions, political parties and cultural associations, while the state

will embrace the armed forces, law courts, prisons , and all the administrative

departments concerning taxation, finance, trade, industry, social security, etc. 40 In

this regard it can be said that, in agreement with Hoare and Smith,

Gramsci did not succeed “in finding a single, wholly satisfactory conception

of ‘civil society’ or the state.”41 Bowden also points out that “importantly,

Gramsci’s distinction between civil society and the state does not mean that there is

a clear and impenetrable boundary between them. There is in fact a considerable

overlapping and interpenetration between the two, just as there is between them

and the market. By conceiving of the spheres as a series or network of social

relationships between individuals, organizations, and institutions—some internal,

some external and some both—it becomes possible to accept the apparent paradox

that some organizations or institutions embody relationships that are characteristic

of both civil society and state apparatus.”42 Of particular interest here is

Gramsci’s remark that hegemony belongs to civil society which is indeed

“the State itself.”44 It seems that Gramsci’s own distinction between the

state and civil society is “merely methodological” rather than substantive

because he stresses that in actual reality civil society and the state are “one

and the same.”45 In this regard it is instructive to note what Burwoy has to

say recently about Gramsci’s contribution: “What distinguishes advanced

from early capitalism is the elaboration of a civil society closely connected to an

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expansive state. This is Gramsci’s momentous, theoretical breakthrough.”46 Two

points can be made here.

First, Gramsci’s reference to civil society, as also young Marx’s

reference to it, is based on Hegel’s conception of civil society (viz. the world

of private needs). Civil society also implies an anthropological perspective

of ‘generic man’, the subject of the economy. In an analysis that pursues

examination of the capitalist state from the point of view of a separation of

the state and civil society, it creates problems in understanding the relation

of the state to the class struggle. For example, it becomes difficult either to

conceive of the specific autonomy of the economic and political instances in

the CMP or to relate the state to classes or class struggles because the state

is related at its origin to the “economic individual agents.” 47 In the mature

Marx’s writings, especially in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

(1852), the ‘separation’ or “independence” 48 of the state and civil society

indicates the fact that “the specific autonomy in the CMP of the capitalist

state from the relations of production is reflected in the field of the class

struggle by an autonomy class struggle from the political class struggle.

This is expressed by the effect of isolation on socio-economic relations, in

which the state assumes a specific autonomy vis-à-vis these relations, in

putting itself forward as the representative of the unity of the

people/nation… .49 In a similar way Gramsci’s discussion of the state and

civil society can be explained.50

The second point concerns the significance which Gramsci attaches

to the capitalist state, that is, the state characterized by the leadership or

“hegemony of the directive and dominant group.” 51 From this point of view,

“hegemony is not just ‘political,’ however, it is also ‘civil’; that is to say, it involves

not just the expansion but also the extension of the state to the newly constituted civil

society, the complex of institutions and organizations that stand between state and

economy.”52 The significance in this respect is precisely the

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involvement of the state in the organization and reproduction of social

relations. This role, it may be argued, is the role of the expanded state in

the capitalist social formations. Gramsci points out that, with the colonial

expansion of Europe, the period since 1870 is characterized by an enormous

growth of mass organizations, especially trade unions and political parties,

and by the increasing complexities of the states and international

organizational relations.53 Attention may also be paid to the factor of the

ability of the social formation to withstand catastrophic incursions of the

immediate economic crisis or depressions. All this is to emphasize the point

that the expanded state’s function covers “the entire complex of practical

and theoretical activities with which the ruling class not only justifies and

maintains its dominance, but manages to win the active consent of those over

whom it rules.”54

Gramsci focused, it may pointed out, on the, ideological practices of

the dominant classes. It is to his credit to have pointed out that ideology is

not a mere reflection of the base. Any claim which asserts that, he points

out, “every fluctuation of politics and ideology can be presented and

expounded as an immediate expression of the structure (i.e. base BKB),

must be contested in theory as primitive infantilism, and combated in

practice with the authentic testimony of Marx.” 55 Basing himself on Marx’s

statement that men acquire consciousness of the conflict between the

material productive forces of society and the existing relations of

production on ‘the ideological terrain, Gramsci realizes the active and

material role of ideology in the social formation. 56 In relation to the

objective of this section of this paper, it may be stressed that ideology

organizes the masses and creates “the terrain on which men move, or

acquire consciousness of their position, struggle, etc.” 57 The dominant

classes succeed in increasing and extracting legitimacy or authentic popular

support of the state when they are able to generate dominated

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classes’ acceptance of and consent to the ‘way of life’ – the ideological

ensemble of values, beliefs, myths etc. – which is supportive of the interests

of the dominant classes and their fractions. The function of the intellectuals

-- the functionaries of the dominant classes for organizing “social

hegemony and state domination” -- consist not only of rendering ideologies

systematic but also of ensuring “the spontaneous consent given by the great

masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by

the dominant fundamental group.” 58 In this connexion, Gramsci refers to

what can be called ‘the ethico-political’ role of the state. The state raises

the great masses of the population to a particular “cultural and moral

level” corresponding to the “needs of the productive forces for

development, and hence to the interest of the ruling classes.” 59 The

activities of the schools, the courts, along with those of private institutions,

tend towards forming and organizing “the apparatus of the political and

cultural hegemony of the ruling classes.” 60

Gramsci revised the classical Marxist conception of the state in such a way

that it is reminiscent of not only of Hegel, but also of Plato and Aristotle. The

capitalist state in Gramsci transcends the parochial class interests of the

bourgeoisie. It succeeds to incorporate the interests of the dominated classes as

integral component of the universal interests of all, retaining however the class

character of the bourgeois state and domination and thus emerges as an ethico-

political entity that promotes social cohesion by asserting hegemony as an integrated

state. As Gramsci states: “The previous ruling classes were essentially conservative

in the sense that they did not tend to construct an organic passage from the other

classes into their own, i.e. to enlarge their class sphere ‘technically’ and

‘ideologically’: their conception was that of a closed caste. The bourgeois class poses

itself as an organism in continuous movement, capable of absorbing the entire

society, assimilating it to its own cultural and economic level. The entire function of

the state has been transformed; the state has become an ‘educator’, etc”61 Fontana

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reminds that the state’s role as educator means that now it wields “moral,

intellectual and cultural force; it exercises power by presenting itself as ‘ethico-

political’, as the representative of universal values, independent of narrow

economic, social or class interests. In so doing, the dominant groups infuse the

‘entire society’ – that is, the subordinate groups – with their specific and

determinate ‘personality.’”62 Gramsci thus overcomes instrumentalism that is

inscribed in the classical conception of the capitalist state:

The state is no longer simple coercion, no longer the organized force of the ruling class used to maintain its supremacy over subordinate groups. As Gramsci notes, no state can maintain its stability and permanence without establishing mechanisms to generate legitimating institutions by which the consent of the population is mobilized. Hence the quasi-Hegelian conception of the ‘integral State’ as a synthesis of dictatorship and hegemony, political society and civil society, in which the first element of the pairs represents the moment of force and the second the moment of consent. Hence also the conception of ‘rule’ as the synthesis of domination (organized coercion) and moral and intellectual leadership. 63

So far the main thrust of the foregoing analysis has been on consent

as a factor of cohesion or social harmony between the dominant and

dominated classes and fractions. This is the ideological aspect of hegemonic

domination. There is another aspect which is also equally and vitally

important. This concerns the economic aspect of hegemonic domination,

and it is also a factor of cohesion between the classes. If I can add, it also

goes on in the direction of securing consent of the dominated classes. 64 As

said by Gramsci, hegemony is not only ethico-political but must be also

“economic.”65 Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that an

account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over

which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise

equilibrium should be formed. In other words, the leading group should

make sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind. But there is also no doubt

that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential. 66

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Stated otherwise, the hegemony of the dominant classes and their fractions

involves a cost, i.e. a certain guarantee to the economic interests of the

dominated classes and fractions by the state in the capitalist society. This

condition of certain economic sacrifices on the part of the dominant classes

is the condition of their hegemony over the dominated classes. “Hegemony”

is thus a relationship of compromises between the dominant and dominated

classes.

Moreover, as indicated earlier, in the political realm the interests of the

dominant classes become the interests of the dominated classes. That is to say, the

interests of the dominant classes and fractions emerge as the universal interests of

which the capitalist state becomes the representative. It is the (political) phase when

previously germinated ideologies become “party”, come into confrontation and

conflict, until only one of them, or at least a single combination of them, tends to

prevail, to gain the upper hand, and to propagate itself throughout society. This

process then brings about not only unison of economic and political aims, but also

the intellectual and moral unity, posing all questions around which the struggle

rages not on a corporate but on a “universal” plane, and thus creating the

hegemony of a fundamental social group over a series of subordinate groups.67

This leads to the final point – the elaboration of the characteristics in which

the capitalist state stands fully revealed. In other words, “the dominant group is co-

ordinated concretely with the general interests of the subordinate groups, and the

life of the State is conceived of as a continuous process of formation and superseding

of unstable equilibria (on the juridical plane) between the interests of the

fundamental group and those of the subordinate groups – equilibria in which the

interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point, i.e., stopping

short of narrowly corporate economic interest.”68

The capitalist state is the organizing center of the political interests of the

dominant classes and fractions thereof. It does not directly represent their economic

interests, for the capitalist state has in its very structure a flexibility that ensures the

18

guarantee of certain economic privileges for the dominated classes. This is not to

say, of course, that the dominant classes do not translate their economic interests

into political interests because they cannot dominate effectively in the long run

unless they set up their economic interests as political interests.69 What is stressed in

Gramsci is the fact that the capitalist state stops short of being a simple tool or

instrument in the hands of the dominant classes and fractions for realization of their

narrow corporate -economic interests. In this sense the capitalist state’s claim to be

the representative of the general or universal interests of the people is real to the

extent that this state assures factually the satisfaction of certain economic interests

of the dominated classes – a factor of cohesion or social harmony between otherwise

different hostile classes. From the point of view of dominant classes and their

fractions, this assurance by the capitalist state is the condition of maintaining their

hegemonic domination. At the same time, Gramsci’s analysis points to the relative

autonomy of the capitalist state vis-à-vis these classes and fractions, to which I now

turn my attention. In the contemporary era of globalization the capitalist state’s

need to promote cohesions has multiplied in view of its deleterious impacts basically

on the dominated classes. The state has now thus an additional burden of stabilizing

“societies that may be experiencing disruption and dislocation as a result of the

effects of globalization. In effectively dealing with these disruptions, states may not

only retain their own legitimacy, but also provide global processes with a veneer of

legitimacy.”70

Regardless of what has been said from the classical Marxist or Gramscian

viewpoints, the theme of civil society, or better the importance of collaborative

partnership between the state and the civil society or non-state actors, has nowadays

become the buzzword in the relevant literature. In all societies, whether advanced

capitalist or not, it is being increasingly recognized that all societal problems and

issues cannot be solved only by the state, which is rolling back under forces of

globalizing capitalist globalization. In this regard the role of the nonstate actors,

especially the civil society, which stands away from but connected with both the

19

state and the market in myriad ways, comes very handy. In fact, one can hardly

ignore the powerful potential of the civil society, particularly in view of a

combination of several factors (viz. resource constraints pressure from the

international donors and multilateral development banks, invisible international

market forces cutting across national frontiers , and citizen demand for democratic

participation and empowerment) that have combined to bring to the fore the

limitations of neoliberal states under expansive global capital accumulation and

social reproduction. On the basis of four empirical case studies Brinkerhoff states

that appropriately structured and managed partnerships between the state and civil

society can produce improved technical policy solutions and outcomes:

From an instrumental/technical viewpoint, state–civil society partnerships make sense. The synergies generated can extend the capacities of both state and nonstate actors beyond what each can accomplish by acting on their own. These synergies, in turn, lead to higher levels of policy impacts and improvements in people’s lives. Such positive outcomes, however, are by no means a foregone conclusion; effective partnerships require a minimum set of facilitative conditions and government actions… .Beyond these direct policy results, state–civil society partnerships can potentially fulfill a broader function of promoting more responsive, transparent, and accountable government. They can facilitate increased citizen participation in public affairs, empowerment of local groups to take charge of their livelihoods, and capacity to advocate for policy reforms with public officials and political figures. Again, these are not guaranteed outcomes; political dynamics, social conflicts, and power differentials can all intervene. Nonetheless, partnerships offer one operational avenue for strengthening democratic forms of governance.71

However, the state-civil society interaction may produce desired results including

promotion of social cohesion among contending classes and groups unless certain

conditions (viz. conducive legal and regulatory framework, ensuring participation,

decentralization etc.) are not fulfilled. Among other things, the nature of political

regime in power will have a significant bearing on the outcome. “Where the state is

unresponsive, its institutions are undemocratic, or its democracy is ill designed to

recognize and respond to citizen demands, the character of collective action will be

20

decidedly different than under a strong and democratic system. Citizens will find

their efforts to organize for civil ends frustrated by state policy—at some times

actively repressed, at others simply ignored.”72

IV. THE RELATIVE AUTONOMY OF THE CAPITALIST

STATE:

By relative autonomy 73 of the state I would refer to the freedom of the

state from being manipulated by the politically dominant classes or their

fractions. This principle, a structural feature of the state in the CMP,

replaces thus the conception of the state as merely a tool or instrument in

the service or hands of the bourgeoisie. Simply stated, the basic point of

instrumentalist viewpoint is that, through the instrumentality of the state

apparatus, capitalists can frame and implement policies that secure their

long-term class interests. The state is, therefore, sort of an instrument in

the hands of the capitalists to serve their interests. 74 But it must be noted

that the relatively autonomous nature of the capitalist state vis-à-vis the

dominant classes or fractions does not in any case mean that such a state is

devoid of its class nature.

The instrumentalist approach, commonly evident in the exegeses of

the Marxist theory of the state, is mainly based on the observations made

by Marx and Engels. In The German Ideology (1845-6) they assert that the

state is the form in which the bourgeoisie ensure mutual guarantee of their

property and interests.75 In the Communist Manifesto (1847-8) they again

say that the executive committee of the modern state is nothing but a

committee for managing the common affairs of the entire bourgeoisie. 76 In

subsequent writings of Marx and Engels similar statements can be found,

adding credence to the instrumentalist approach. Lenin in his The State and

Revolution (1917) also refers to the state as “an instrument for the

exploitation of the oppressed class.”77

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Although there are still many adherents to this approach, 78 there are

several problems associated with this kind of construal. Very often a nexus

between the instrumentalist approach and economism, on the one hand, and

voluntarism, on the other, can be found. For example, the instrumentalist

approach is integrated with economic reductionism through an assumption

that the economic base determines the form of the state as an instrument

and also the balance of classes in the struggle for state power. In the

voluntaristic interpretation, the emphasis is placed on the independent role

of the political action.79 There are still other problems. First, in the said

approach, there is an inherent tendency to assume the class neutrality of

the state. The state is an instrument or tool for any class that is in the

positions of the state apparatuses. Second, if the state is simply an

instrument or tool in the hands of a given class, then it becomes difficult to

answer why it is necessary to smash the state apparatuses rather than take

over its control.80 Third, this approach encounters serious difficulties when

the economically dominant class does not hold positions in the state

apparatuses, or is not even the ruling class that rules. A ruling class may

hold positions in the state apparatuses without at the same time being the

dominant class. Marx cited the case of Britain in the 19 th century when the

landed aristocracy was the ruling class and the bourgeoisie – the industrial

and commercial – was really the dominant class. Further, the complexities

of the modern state power, the role of class fractions or alliances, and the

role of the supporting classes (e.g. small-holding peasantry) contribute to

the inability of the bourgeoisie, the economically dominant class, to be in

the immediate control of the state. In view of all these above-mentioned

factors, a correlation between the direct participation of the members of

the bourgeoisie in the state apparatuses and their instrumental exercise of

the state power, in the formulation and guidance of state policies, as

Miliband has recently done, 81 is at best

22

inadequate to reveal the position of the capitalist state in the CMP and the

structural constraints within which it (the state) operates. Poulantzas has

duly pointed out the following:

The relation between the bourgeois class and the state is an objective relation. This means that if the function of the state in a determinate social formation and the interests of the dominant class in this formation coincide, it is by reason of the system itself; the direct participation of the members of the ruling class in the state apparatuses is not the cause but the effect, and moreover a chance and contingent one, of this objective coincidence.82

However, it should be pointed out there that even the instrumentalists like

Miliband83 do not throw away altogether the relative autonomy of the

capitalist state. But in the last instance, the instrumental class character of

the capitalist state actually comes out. As Miliband himself states in his

Marxism and Politics (1978), “the relative autonomy consists in the degree

of freedom which the state (normally meaning in this context the executive

power) has in determining how best to serve what those who hold power

conceive to be the ‘national interest’, and which in fact involves the service

of the interests of the ruling class. … The relative independence of the state

does not reduce its class character; on the contrary, its relative independence

makes it possible for the state to play its class role in an approximately flexible

manner. If it was really the simple ‘instrument’ of the ‘ruling class’, it would be

fatally inhibited in the performance of its role. Its agents absolutely need a measure

of freedom in deciding how best to serve the existing social order.”84

In the light of Marx’s subsequent work, most importantly his The

Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), it is clear that Marx alludes

to the simple instrumentality of the state in metaphors and aphorisms. The

more extended and concrete analyses of both Marx and Engels point to the

other direction, to which I now return. The independence 85 of the state,

after the coup d’état of Bonaparte on December

23

2, 1851, was accomplished by the victory of Bonaparte over the parliament,

of the executive power over the legislative power. “The struggle between

different social classes was settled in such a way that all classes, equally

impotent and equally mute, fall on their knees before the rifle butt.” 86 Marx

refers to the expansion of the executive power with its huge bureaucratic

and military organization. “Every common interest was straightway

severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher general interest,

snatched from the activity of society’s members themselves and made an

object of government activity… .” 87 Marx then goes on to say in conclusive

terms that “only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have

made itself completely independent.” 88 Despite the Bonaparte state’s

autonomy in relation to all social classes, Marx was however never in doubt

about the class character of this state, which was really an adequate regime

of the capitalist order.89 Moreover, it represented the most numerous class,

the small-holding peasants.

The general explanation of this autonomy of the state, endorsed by

both Marx and Engels, is often grounded upon a situation of equilibrium

between social classes. For example, Engels attributes this to exceptional

periods when warring classes are so nearly equal in forces that the state

power acquires for the moment a certain independence from these classes. 90

By way of exception, however, periods occur in which the warring classes balance each other so nearly that the state power, as ostensible mediator, acquires, for the moment, a certain degree of independence of both. Such was the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which held the balance between the nobility and the class of burghers; such was the Bonapartism of the First, and still more of the Second French Empire, which played off the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. The latest performance of this kind ... is the new German Empire of the Bismarck nation: here the capitalists and workers are balanced against each other and equally cheated for the benefit of the impoverished Prussian cabbage junkers.91

24

Marx also refers to this scheme of explanation by saying that “in reality, it

was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie

had already lost, and the working class has not yet acquired, the faulty of

ruling the nation.”92

In this regard, the telling contribution of Poulantzas consists in

establishing that the relative autonomy of the capitalist state vis-à-vis the

dominant classes and fractions does not rest on the general scheme of the

equilibrium of social forces in exceptional periods, but is significantly a

“constitutive characteristic of the capitalist type of the state.” 93 This state

is characterized by, in the CMP embedded in a capitalist social formation,

the specific autonomy of its structures from the economic and the economic

class struggle, on the one hand, and by its relation to the political class

struggle, 94 on the other. However, before I focus on the relative autonomy

of the state in respect of the dominant classes or their fractions as a feature

of the modern capitalist state, it should be pointed out that there is another

feature of this state, that is, the unity of its class power. Both are related.

The capitalist state presents relative autonomy to the extent that it

possesses its own unity of class power in the sense that the state’s power

cannot be shared or divided between different classes and fractions. At one

and the same time the capitalist state possesses this unity to the extent that

it is relatively autonomous from these classes or fractions. 95

An important characteristic of the capitalist classes or its fractions is

their incapacity to organize themselves into a homogeneous ruling class and

to raise themselves to the political level. This necessitates the state to step

in to take charge of the capitalist classes’ political interests and also to

realize their political hegemony.96 There are two reasons which account for

the incapacity of the capitalist classes. First, they are often divided into

several fractions which sink more often than not into fractional rivalries.

They cannot raise themselves to the political level on the basis of their

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politically conceived common interests.97 Second, their incapacity is also

due to the problems which they encounter in their struggle against the

dominated classes and their fractions. In particular, the dominant classes

or their fractions increasingly find it difficult to realize their political

hegemony vis-à-vis the dominated classes including the organized political

struggle of the working class. The persistent isolation of the economic class

struggle of the dominated classes necessitates the political organization of

these classes, particularly of the working classes. Here the state functions

to disable and disorganize the dominated classes, and it is thus a factor of

their political disorganization. The state presents itself as the

representative of the general interests of all people and of their political

unity. This is legitimated, in the capitalist countries, by the existence of

political institutions – universal suffrage, public liberties, public opinion,

etc. – inside which political class domination is systematically absent. 98

In performing these two functions – political organization of the

dominant classes and political disorganization of the dominated classes –

the capitalist state requires relative autonomy from the dominant classes or

their fractions. First, it requires relative autonomy from the dominant

classes or fractions in order to realize their political unity and their

common interests.99 Second, it requires relative autonomy with a view to

posing effectively as the representative of the political unity of all people.

In regard to the state’s relative autonomy, another factor may also be

mentioned. This concerns the capitalist state’s relation to the supporting

classes such as the small holding peasantry which exists because of the

existence of non-dominant modes of production in the capitalist social

formations. The capitalist state often benefits from their incapacity to

represent themselves politically. Sometimes the state plays them off against

the dominant classes. But the state can do this only by realizing the relative

autonomy which it has vis-à-vis the dominant classes and fractions. Thus

26

the relative autonomy allows the state to remain in touch with the political

interests of the supporting classes.100

Given this relative autonomy, it must be stated that the capitalist

state constitutes an unambiguous and exclusive political power of the

dominant classes and their fractions. This is to say that the relative

autonomy is possible to the extent that the capitalist state constitutes their

political power in its unity. The emphasis on unity means that the state’s

power cannot be shared or parceled out between different classes and class

fractions. Neither does it enable the dominant classes to effectively

participate in the political power. In this sense, the state power is not a tool

of the dominant classes.101 Moreover, as the capitalist state represents the

political interests and not directly the economic interests of the dominant

classes and their fractions, these classes and fractions can effectively

realize their political interests provided the state is relatively autonomous

from them. The relative autonomy of the state thus enables it to satisfy

certain economic interests of the dominated classes and also to challenge

the short-term or even long-term interests of the dominant classes.

This relative autonomy allows the state to intervene not only in order

to arrange compromises vis-à-vis the dominated classes, which, in the long

run, are useful for realizing the actual economic interests of the dominant

classes or their fractions, but also (depending on the concrete conjuncture)

to intervene against the long-term economic interests of one or other

fraction of the dominant class because such compromises and sacrifices are

sometimes necessary for the realization of their political class interests. 102

This how Hirsch frames his rationale for the relative autonomy of the

capitalist state:

The emergence of a state apparatus formally separated from all social classes - from the capitalist class too - and the resulting institutionalized division between 'politics' and 'economics' is a structural requirement for the stable reproduction of capitalist societies. The decisive reason for this division derives from the

27

prerequisite of an economic reproduction based on private labor, exchange, and the law of value, which requires an institutionalization of physical coercive power that is separated from the immediate agents of production - capitalists and wage laborers… . At the same time, this 'relative autonomy' of the state and the establishment of its monopoly on legitimate physical force' is a decisive precondition for the regulability of class relationships, i.e. for the legitimation of power and the enforceability of social compromises. However, these structural conditions of stability and reproduction of capitalist societies are not at all functionally guaranteed. They only emerge - if at all - within and through complex social struggles, which are determined by the strategies of conflicting actors.103

The foundation of the political power of the capitalist state is what

Poulantzas calls, following Gramsci, “an unstable equilibrium of

compromise”104 which provides the basis of so-called “social functions” of

the capitalist state -- the whole series of socio-economic reforms

simultaneously imposed on and extracted by the dominated classes. At the

same time, these reforms are not a fetter on the political power of the

dominant classes. Here the political class struggle of the dominated classes

takes on importance. The variations or the degree of relative autonomy,

which state may have, will depend in particular form or intensity of the

political class struggle of the dominated classes. 105

Let me now refer briefly to how Poulantzas explains the relative

autonomy of the Bonapartist state, which reflected a new articulation of the

political and the economic in the relations between structures and the field

of class struggle. As has already been mentioned elsewhere in this paper,

Marx referred to the antagonism or separation between the state and civil

society or society, 106 or to the independence of the state. Here Marx was

referring not only to the relative autonomy of the political and economic

instances as reflected in the dislocation between the state and economic

class struggle107 but also to the relative autonomy of the state vis-à-vis the

dominant classes or fractions. The relation between the state and the

political interests of these classes, which Marx frequently distinguished

28

from their ‘private’ ‘economic’, ‘selfish’, etc. interests, establishes itself

only by a relative autonomy between the state and these classes, whose

secret is revealed by Bonapartism: its essential characteristic is precisely

that particular independence of the state from the dominant classes. 108

The Bonapartist state presented itself as the representative of the

political unity of the people by being itself relatively autonomous from the

dominant classes. It assumed relative autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant

classes including the financial fraction (viz. the dominant fraction) in its

function of presenting political unity and in its role as a unifying factor of

the dominant classes and fractions. At the same time the Bonapartist state,

posing as the ‘official’ representative of the small holding peasantry,

realized its autonomy vis-à-vis the dominant classes. But, finally, it must be

noted that the Bonapartist state served “the interests of the bourgeoisie in

its ensemble and in particular the interests of financial capital… .” 109

V. THE STATE INTERVENTION:

By state intervention, I would mainly refer to the state’s actions in the economy, that is, how the capitalist state positively steps in the economy to facilitate the process of capitalist accumulation. Indeed the capitalist state intervenes in the economy in order to reestablish conditions, which tend to be upset in periods of economic crisis, of capitalist production and accumulation.110 The issue and importance of interventionist role of the capitalist state is inextricably bound up with the structuralist theory of the capitalist state. The core assumption of this theory is that capitalist social formations are vulnerable to crises and contradictions (viz. economic stagnation, competition, over-production, capital-labor conflict over private appropriation of surplus, etc.) that are concomitant with capitalist economy which coerces the state into intervening to protect the interests of the bourgeoisie by restoring and maintaining economic stability and mediating ongoing class struggles in the capitalist society. 111 The structuralist interpretation explains why the

29

capitalist state will inevitably get involved in order for ensuring capital

accumulation and social reproduction while preventing the occurrence of

radical transformation of the capitalist society. Needles to add, the

capitalist state can intervene because it enjoys relative autonomy from the

capitalist class.112

The label “state intervention” is often applied to distinguish the state

of the advanced capitalist social formations from the (liberal) state of the

nineteenth century competitive capitalism in which the state’s functions

were of minor importance. Most notably, then the role of the state was

restricted to its function of preserving law and order in the social

formation in which capitalism worked by itself. 113 But such a view remains

uncorroborated.114 The so-called liberal state was interventionist in the

sense that it actually played an active role in directing the economy for

securing conditions for capital accumulation in several ways: the

imposition of taxes or customs duties, the building up of economic

infrastructure such as railroads, the regulation of banking system, stock

market and foreign trade. The liberal state always played this role, though

more in Germany and France and less in Britain and America. 115

The question then becomes pertinent as to what constitutes the special feature of the state intervention in this stage of monopoly capitalism.116 The answer is best provided in the words of Poulantzas:

In the state of monopoly capitalism, the role of the state in its decisive intervention into the economy is not restricted essentially to the reproduction of what Engels termed the ‘general conditions’ of the production of surplus value: the state is also involved in the actual process of the extended reproduction of capital as a social relation. 117

In the Grundrisse (1857-8) Marx refers to the “contradictions, crises and spasms” that arise in the course of the capitalist economic development. For example, he mentions the tendential fall of the rate of profit due to increased investment in machinery relative to living labor in production.

30

Marx’s reference to the crisis situations may be summarized in the following passage in the Grundrisse:

Hence the highest development of productive power together with the greatest expansion of existing wealth will coincide with the depreciation of capital, degradation of the laborer, and a most straitened exhaustion of his vital powers. These contradictions lead to explosions, cataclysms, crises, in which by momentous suspension of labor and annihilation of a great portion of capital the latter is violently reduced to the point where it can go on.118

In this context it may be said that the state comes into action in the economic sphere in order to solve problems which are posed by the development of capitalism.119 Attention may also be given to Marx’s discussion of the Factory legislation regulating the working day. 120 As for Engels, he points up in his Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (1880) the state’s role in the maintenance of “the existing conditions of production.” 121

Whereas in the views of Marx and Engels the economic role of the state is clear in its action to solve the economic crisis or to maintain the conditions of capitalist production and extended reproduction, the contributions of recent theorists lie in extending this line of formulations. Stated otherwise, the recent theorists focus centrally on the distinctive role of the state in respect of its function of reproducing the conditions of capitalist production and accumulation. The works of Althusser, Miliband and Szymanski, among others, illustrate this aspect.

In the advanced countries the educational institutions exist mainly as ‘socializing’ agency or as ‘ideological’ apparatus of the state. In particular, the school system functions not only to produce more or less a larger pool of trained or skilled workers but also to produce, more importantly, a disciplined and obedient labor force.122 As one commentator observes:

The primary schools emphasize the importance of discipline as much they do the learning of concrete skills. The primary schools inculcate factory discipline in the working class. Standing in line, raising one’s hand, getting permission to go to the bathroom, not talking, not eating in the class room, unquestioned acceptance of what the teacher and textbooks

31

say, punctuality, and regular attendance are just as important for the youngster to learn as reading, writing and arithmetic if he or she is to be a good workers.123

There is indeed a plethora of reasons why the state is not only not going to

suffer any imminent demise but also why it will intervene for hundreds of

other extra-economic reasons in hundreds of ways. For instance, “ markets,

NGOs, media companies, commercial organizations and interests, and all the other

institutions that propel globalization need a secure environment to prosper. They

look to the state to protect them from criminal or terrorist attack; to ensure law and

order and the stabilization and enforcement of property rights; to develop

communications infrastructure; to prepare the labor supply through education and

training; and, more generally, to provide economic support through congenial tax

regimes, subsidies, or other forms of state intervention.”124 An example from the

British capitalist state’s interventionist role can be cited here to illustrate the point

that even in the neoliberal post-Fordist period the state interventionism has not

waned, if not expanded. Crawford, while subjecting the notions of ‘networked

governance’ and ‘responsive regulation’ to empirical examination in his study of

changing policing and security governance in the context of the British state,

found that, instead of withdrawal, the British state has become even more

regulatory, immersing itself in the ‘deployment of hierarchy, command and

interventionism’. This is so even when the state intervention, though aimed at

imposing social harmony, is not directly related to valorization of capital.

Far from being dead, in the UK, ambitious interventionist government is alive and well. A few examples will suffice. First, we have witnessed the expansion of state control into institutions previously shielded from the force of government control, notably in school education—but universities have not been immune to this, although they have been better at capturing the regulatory tools imposed upon them (most notably the Research Assessment Exercise). Schools in Britain have become the subjects of a revolution in regulation, which has seen self-regulation replaced by an elaborate and complex mosaic of micro-management by government. … The family, once perceived as the bastion of private life into which the

32

state had no right to intervene except to protect life and limb, now is the site of much government activity and intervention. Not only does

the state see fit to try to regulate what people put on their dinner tables with endless (and often contradictory) advice and guidance, but it has taken a much more proactive role in parenting. ‘Parenting orders’, first introduced by the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 have been extended under the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003. Parenting orders are available to the courts where the young person has been involved in crime, anti-social behavior or where a pupil has been excluded from school for serious misbehavior. They entail sending a parent—usually the mother—on a programme of parenting classes and, in some instances, providing limited support for parents. … Recent years have seen parents sent to prison for the persistent truancy of their children and on-the-spot fines for parents of persistent truants.6 All these initiatives expose the same central paradox of imposing civility through coercion. 125

There is little substance in the logic that the state, even in the midst of neoliberalism,

is neither becoming superfluous nor dying out. In more ways than one the state

retains a powerful anchoring role in command and control in respect of social

regulation. “What we see resulting is not the state becoming ‘weaker’ or necessarily

‘smarter’, but rather diverse forms of a more frenetic, volatile, contradictory and

politicized regulation of behavior. This hyperactivity, its ambiguous consequences

and uneven implementation have largely been overlooked by proponents of the post-

regulatory state thesis and networked governance.”126

Let me now turn to the more important functions of the state in

situations when it positively intervenes in order to clear up specific

bottlenecks or crises in private capital investment, which stand in the way

of continued accumulation of capital. For example, some physical input

such as labor power or raw materials are required for production in order

to maintain the accumulation of capital. But such physical inputs on which

accumulation depends may not be available in certain situations. The

accumulating units may not produce such inputs because they may not find

production of those inputs, among other reasons, profitable. Because of the

lack of cohesion among the capitalist classes in the pursuit fractional

33

interests of profit maximization, the state through its own material

production positively intercedes to manage such crisis by creating

conditions that are essential for continued capitalist accumulation. Needless

to add, the state creates such conditions which the accumulating units are

themselves incapable of creating by their own activity. 127

A good example of how the state creates and maintains the conditions

in which capital accumulation continues has been provided by O’Connor.

He shows that enormous growth of the state expenditures has increasingly

become a means of continued accumulation, especially by the monopoly

sector of American economy. In 1890, the total government spending was

less than 8 percent of the GNP; in 1960, it went over 34 percent of the

GNP.128 The growth of the state and monopoly sectors has coincided in a

single process, and the growth of state expenditures represents the state’s

socialization of the costs of production in the monopoly sector. The state

expenditures under the heading of social capital expenditures (divided

between social investment and social consumption) are instrumental to

private accumulation and are indirectly productive. For the monopoly

sector engaged in the production of steel, copper, aluminium, etc. such

expenditures are simply unproductive. As O’Connor says, “The general

reason is that the increase in the social character of production

(specialization, division of labor, interdependency, the growth of new social

forms of capital such as education, etc) either prohibits or renders

unprofitable the private accumulation of constant and variable capital. 129

Social investment (i.e. social constant capital) expenditures increase

generally the productivity of a given amount of labor and thus increases

profit. These expenditures are either on physical capital projects and

services such as roads and highways, railways, electric gas, water and other

related projects, or urban renewal projects, etc.; or on human capital

projects and services covering, for example, teaching, administrative and

34

other services, or services in the scientific and R & D inside and outside the

educational establishment. In respect of the interventionist role of the state

in the background of inherent contradictions in capitalism and the lack of

cohesion among the capitalists, O’Connor has this to say:

In every advanced capitalist country monopoly capital has socialized part or all of the costs of planning, constructing, and developing and modernizing physical social capital projects. These costs are socialized for two general reasons. First, most physical capital is used to supply goods or services that private capital requires on a permanent basis. Short-term or medium term profit maximization in electric power production and distribution, water development investments, port modernization, and similar projects is highly important for the corporations and industries immediately affected… . But these projects serve a large number of diverse corporations and industries, and from the standpoint of capital as a whole the projects are important mainly because they insure a regular flow or goods and services at stable, minimal prices. Second, projects are socialized because costs often exceed the resources of or are regarded as unacceptable financial risks by the companies immediately concerned.130

The state’s expenditures on the social consumption (social variable capital)

such as social insurance, public housing, state financed suburban

development etc. also point to the same direction. The expenditures in these

services are increasingly socialized. These services lower the reproduction

costs of labor and so increase the rate of profit. 131 A good example can be

given in the case of social insurance for workers against the work-related

accidents and illness, old age, unemployment etc. The expansion of various

social security programs can be considered a result of the technological,

cyclical and other forms of unemployment that accompany the capitalist

economic development. The main purpose behind the social security

program is, in the words of O’Connor, “to create a sense of economic

security within the ranks of employed workers (especially workers in the

monopoly sector) and thereby raise morale and reinforce discipline. This

35

contributes to harmonious management-labor relations which are

indispensable to capital accumulation and growth of production. Thus the

fundamental intent and effect of social security is to expand productivity,

production and profits. Seen in this way, social insurance is not primarily

insurance for workers, but a kind of insurance for capitalists and

corporations.”132

A more recent example comes from the extremely influential writings

of Jessop who refers to “the inherent incapacity of capitalism to achieve self-

closure in economic terms or, in other words, to its inability to reproduce itself

wholly through the value form in a self-expanding logic of commodification.”133 His

argument is that a host of structural limits and contradictions are there. For

instance, capitalism’s inherent incapacity to generate accumulation is related to the

fictitious nature of land, money, knowledge and, above all, labor-power as

commodities and also to the dependence of accumulation on various non-commodity

forms of social relations. Whether conceptually or in concrete, the reproduction of

capitalism depends on its achieving ‘an inherently unstable balance among market-

mediated economic supports and other extra-economic supports’ that lie beyond

market mechanisms. All this, along many other considerations, implies that

capitalist dynamic is in itself incomplete. 134 To illustrate Jessop’s argument with

reference to such factors as labor power and land – factors that become

transformed as commodities not necessarily due to the inherent dynamics of

capitalism:

What most distinguishes capitalism from other forms of producing goods and services for sale is the generalization of the commodity form to labor-power. … The generalization of the commodity form to labor-power does not mean that labor-power actually becomes a commodity. Instead it becomes a fictitious commodity. The latter is something that has the form of a commodity (in other words, that can be bought and sold) but is not itself created in a profit-oriented labor process subject to the typical competitive pressures of market forces to rationalize its production and reduce the turnover time of invested capital. … ‘Land’ comprises all natural endowments (whether located on, beneath or above the earth’s surface) and their productive

36

capacities in specific contexts. The current form of such natural endowments typically reflects the past and present social transformation of nature as well as natural developments that occur without human intervention. Virgin land and analogous resources are not produced as commodities by capitalist enterprises but are appropriated as gifts of nature and then transformed for profit – often without due regard to their specific reproduction cycles, overall renewability, or, in the case of land, water and air, their capacities to absorb waste and pollution. … Finally, the ability to work is a generic human capacity. It gains a commodity form only insofar as workers can be induced or coerced to enter labor markets as waged labor. Moreover, even when it has acquired a commodity form, labor-power is reproduced through non-market as well as market institutions and social relations. … I focus briefly and commonsensically on labor-power as a generic human capacity. Human reproduction is not organized capitalistically – not yet, at least. Babies are rarely brought into this world as commodities (despite the commercial possibilities of surrogacy and new reproductive technologies); and they are typically cared for in families (or family surrogates) without serious resort to the cash nexus for such care.135

Jessop shows, in the following Table No. 2, some examples of contradictions or tensions inherent in the basic forms of capital relation. The capitalist state inevitably comes into the picture and takes on an interventionist role for securing many key conditions for the ‘valorization of capital and the reproduction of labor-power’ as well as for ‘maintaining social cohesion in a socially divided, pluralistic social formation.’136

Even a pure capitalist economy, notwithstanding the claims of some classical economists and neoliberal ideologues, would be prone to market failure. Individual capitals compete for profit, act self-interestedly and try to avoid limits on their freedom of action. Competition discourages individual capitals from undertaking activities necessary for economic and social reproduction that are unprofitable from their individual viewpoint and it may also lead them into activities that undermine the general conditions for economic and social reproduction. Regarding economic reproduction, for example, there is no guarantee that the general external conditions for production (such as law, property and money) will be secured through market forces; nor that certain general economic conditions of production (‘public goods’) will be offered at the right price in the right quantities. This suggests the need for extra-economic institutions to compensate for partial or total market failure in the provision of the

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Table No. 2Sources of tension in basic forms of the capital relation

No.Form Exchange-value moment Use-value moment

Commodity Exchange-value Use-value

1Labour-power

(a) abstract labour as a substitutable factor of production

(a) generic and concrete skills, different forms of knowledge

(b) sole source of surplus value (b) source of craft pride for worker

2 Wage

(a) monetary cost of production

(a) source of effectivedemand

(b) means of securing supply of useful labour for given time

(b) means to satisfy wantsin a cash-based society

3 money

(a) interest bearing capital, private credit

(a) measure of value,store of value, meansof exchange

(b) international currency (b) national money, legal

(b) national money, legaltender

(c) ultimate expression of capital in general

(c) general form of powerin the wider society

4 Productive capital

(a) abstract value in motion or(capital capital) available for specific some form of investment in future

(a) stock of specific assetsto be valorized inspecific time and placeunder conditions

(b) source of profits (b) concrete entrepreneurialand managerial skills

5 Land (a) ‘free gift of nature’ that is [currently] unalienable

(a) freely available and]uncultivated resources

(b) alienated and alienable property,source of rents

(b) transformed naturalresources

6 Knowledge (a) intellectual property (b) monetized risk

(a) intellectual commons (b) uncertainty

7 State Ideal collective capitalist Factor of social cohesion

Source: Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, p. 20

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important conditions for capital accumulation. These include a formally rational monetary system, a formally rational legal system and the reproduction of labor-power as a fictitious commodity. But … there are many other conditions too. In this sense, state intervention is not just a secondary activity aimed at modifying the effects of a self-sufficient market but is absolutely essential to capitalist production and market relations. For commodities must be produced before they can be distributed via the market and/or political action. Thus, given the institutional separation between the economic and the political, the state must ensure that capital accumulation occurs before it can begin its redistributive activities.137

Indeed, there are many ways in which the capitalist state intrudes in

ensuring the extended reproduction of capitalist production and

accumulation. In achieving the goals of valorization of capital and social

reproduction the state exploits various means (viz. force, law and regulation,

money, goods and services, knowledge, or ‘moral suasion’ ) at various levels of policy

that will vary over time within the contexts of the specific nature of prevalent

accumulation regime.138 The fundamental point that Jessop makes is that capitalist

state in general has to intervene in capitalism as whole because it lacks a en suite

dynamic that will ensure valorization of capital and social reproduction outside the

market relations.

An example of the state’s role in facilitating the valorization of

capital can be given from the area of environmental sociology. Ecological

Marxists, for example, presume that close relations between the states and

environmental organizations will result in greater substantive state intervention

environmental domain. It thus points up the central role of state–capital relations

but predicts a greater likelihood for environmental degradation resulting from close

state–capital relations. Mackendrick and Davidson’s case study of natural resource

management in Alberta shows that in the last instance the state aligns itself “more

closely with capital-producing sectors associated with the greatest economic returns

to the public treasury, while marginalizing civil society actors that contest the logic

of industrial expansion.”139 Summarizing the works of Marxists writers such as

39

James O’Connor and Allan Schnaiberg, they contend that

Due to their dependence on revenues generated by capitalist production, states act as mediators between capital and nature. As environmental degradation increases the costs of production, states interfere with the conditions of production by decreasing the cost of raw materials and absorbing the costs of environmental remediation, with the overall goal to sustain the capitalist ‘treadmill of production’. … Ecological Marxists maintain that ecological limits to economic production nevertheless still interfere with these attempts at remediation, and a more radical shift in production and consumption processes is necessary for substantive environmental reform.140

To cite another example, how the capitalist state operates and intervenes in the

extended reproduction of capital accumulation and accompanying social inequality

can further be elaborated from the perspective of radical/Marxist criminology in the

light of the concept of state-corporate crime, a concept that originated in the 1980s

and developed in the 1990s. “The theory of state-corporate crime is deeply

concerned with the political and economic processes that enable state and corporate

managers to pursue plans and policies—often in concert with one another—that

result in death, injury, ill health, financial loss, and increasingly in the globalized

capitalist economy, cultural destruction, all the while being insulated from the full

weight of criminalization for these actions.”141 The theory the theory of state-

corporate crime highlights how the interests of capital and the interests of the state

intersect and coalesce in the criminal process in which the state emerges an equal

rather than subsidiary player.142 The concept of state-corporate crime was

developed to point to a neglected form of criminal organizational misconduct

perpetrated by the joint action of the corporations and government apparatuses.

Indeed it is a fact that the modern corporations in the capitalist society, such as the

United States, could not have emerged or functioned without the legal, economic,

and political infrastructures provided by the state which, in turn, depend on

corporations to furnish necessary goods and services as well revenues accruing

from individual salaries and/or corporate profits.143 On the basis of the four

published case studies of state-corporate crime in the US, Kramer shows

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how state and corporate interests can join to produce profound social and personal injury and death. Sometimes, as with state-initiated, state-corporate crime, the state is actively and explicitly involved in crime commission. Other times, the state is complicit because it or one of its agencies has failed to protect people vulnerable to potentially harmful organizational practices…. Indeed, the various goals of the offending organizations are nested in particular historical contexts and have their roots in the drive for capital accumulation, capital facilitation, political legitimacy, and/or hegemony. Cultural definitions favorable to capitalism along with a conspicuous ambivalence displayed by elites for the safety of workers, consumers, and the natural environment also provided fertile grounds for the crimes. To wit: deregulation in the ValuJet case, political expediency in the Challenger disaster, imperialism in the nuclear weapons production case, and incredibly high levels of anti worker and probusiness interests in the Imperial Food case. 144

Even the general observation of the World Development Report 1997 on the negative consequences of an interventionist state, let alone a capitalist state, is quite incisive in pointing out that “ there is no guarantee that state intervention will benefit society. The state's monopoly on coercion, which gives it the power to intervene effectively in economic activity, also gives it the power to intervene arbitrarily.”145 Harvey provides a good example of this bailing out the firms in financial crises by neoliberal states. They ensure the diffusion of influence of financial institutions by virtue of its policy of deregulation. But all at once they also guarantee the integrity and solvency of those institutions without any regard to cost such guarantee necessitates. The state does this in view of its reliance on monetarism as the basis of state policy – the integrity and

soundness of money is a central pinion of that policy. But this paradoxically means that the neoliberal state cannot tolerate any massive financial defaults even when it is the financial institutions that have made the bad decisions. The state has to step in and replace ‘bad’ money with its own supposedly ‘good’ money – which explains the pressure on central bankers to maintain confidence in the soundness of state money. State power has often been used to bail out companies or avert financial failures, such as the US savings and loans crisis of 1987-8, which cost US taxpayers an estimated $150 billion, or

41

the collapse of the hedge fund Loan Term Capital Management in 1997-8, which cost $3.5 billion.146

The final example is provided by Block who speaks of the rise of what he

calls the ‘development state’ in Europe and the United States. Its

emergence is in spite of the of their professed commitment to post-Fordist

regime of accumulation, neo-liberalism and free market ideology, all of

which proclaim vociferously for the rolling back of the (interventionist)

state. Block points out that in the last three decades the states in both

Europe and America have intervened in order to retain their technological

hegemony in the world market by providing various types of assistance to

the private sectors and thus to assist private capital valorization.

On both sides of the Atlantic, governments have played an increasingly important role in underwriting and encouraging the advance of new technologies in the business economy. Consistent with ideas of the “knowledge economy” or postindustrial society that stress the economy’s immediate dependence on scientific and technological advance, governments have embraced developmental policies that support cutting edge research and work to assure that innovations are transformed into commercial products by companies. Governments do this because they recognize that in a competitive world economy, failing to create new high value added economic activities in the home economy will ultimately threaten their citizen’s standard of living.147

There is, however, one glaring exception. Unlike that in Europe, the developmental

state, which is now maturing into a Development Network State (DNS), is hidden

from the public debate and discussion; its existence is recognized neither in political

debate nor in the media. “The hidden quality of the U.S. developmental state is

largely a result of the dominance of market fundamentalist ideas over the last thirty

years. Developmental policies have lived in the shadows because acknowledging the

state’s central role in promoting technological change is inconsistent with the

market fundamentalist claim that private sector firms should simply be left alone to

respond autonomously and spontaneously to the signals of the marketplace.”148 The

purpose of setting up the DNS is to help firms to come up with product and process

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innovations which are not yet existence and but which are cutting edge technological

innovations such areas as new software applications, new biotech medications, or

new medical instruments. The Development Network State can bee seen as a

community of people who possess high levels of scientific and technological

expertise. Obviously to build a reservoir of such experts the state has to make

substantial financial investments in higher scientific and engineering education.

Once this is done and produces a certain usable critical mass of scientific and

engineering expertise, the DNS then attempts to make “this technological

community more effective in translating research into actual products. The DNS can

be thought of as a set of government actions that are designed to improve the

productivity of a nation’s scientists and engineers.”149

The four distinct but overlapping tasks of the DNS, which are in effect state

interventions for promoting development in terms generating new technological

products and processes and which in the last instance expedite capitalist

accumulation at global market, are: targeted resourcing, opening windows,

brokering, and facilitation. Block provides several examples of how the DNS

stepped in. One good example is the role of ARPA (Advanced Research Projects

Agency), an office in the Pentagon, along with its Information Processing

Techniques Office (IPTO), both being funding sources for encouraging “beyond the

horizon” technologies. To summarize its leading contributions:

ARPA initiatives occurred across a range of technologies, but it was the offices that supported technological advance in the computer field that established a new paradigm for technology policy. ARPA’s computer offices carefully cultivated a model that was quite distinct from the standard practice of other government agencies that fund research. … ARPA was far more proactive in shaping the direction of research. From the start, it engaged in targeted resourcing. ARPA made a practice of hiring visionary technologists and giving them a very high degree of autonomy to give out research funds. The organizational structure was extremely lean with very small staffs and a minimum of paperwork. ARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) was initially established in 1962 and played a central role in the advance of computer technology in the 1960s and 1970s. IPTO provided the resources to create computer science

43

departments at major universities and funded a series of research project that successfully pushed forward advances in the human-computer interface. In fact, many of the technologies that were ultimately incorporated into the personal computer were developed by ARPA-funded researchers. Of course, the Internet itself began as an ARPA project in the late 1960s that encouraged communication among computer researchers funded by the agency. While responsibility for the early Internet was eventually shifted from ARPA to NSF, it was in the ARPA period that the technological barriers to networked communication among computers were overcome.150

Block thus concludes by saying that

legislative and executive branch decisions made in the United States between 1980 and 1992 significantly expanded the capacity of the U.S. state to accelerate technological development in the business economy. Since then, this capacity has grown into a highly decentralized Developmental Network State, and this DNS has transformed the way many businesses operate and has successfully focused a large cadre of publicly funded researchers on the task of turning new technologies into commercially viable products and processes. Essentially, Daniel Bell’s postindustrial vision of a knowledge society built around government-university-industry has been largely realized.151

Having finished the main burden of this paper, let me first articulate a few

concluding remarks on the issues that have constituted the main content of

of the first concern of the present paper As it is now evident, I have focused

on three important areas concerning the capitalist state. In these three

areas -- the cohesion between classes, the relative autonomy of the state,

and the state intervention -- the contributions of the recent neo-Marxists

are quite significant. Their significance can be indicated in this way. The

thinking about the capitalist state or the state per se in the history of

Marxism has been sporadic and uneven from the 1840s to the early 1930s.

The situation did not actually improve until the late 1960s and 1970s, when

serious Marxist studies on the capitalist state was stimulated apparently by

the triumph of the Keynesian national welfare state in the successful management

capitalism by Atlantic Fordism and by the analysts’ interests to show that this state

form was essentially capitalist in character. The second wave of studies of the state

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was essentially capitalist in character. This second wave of studies typified the

regulation approach to political economy and this approach analyzed in a

more complex and concrete way the capitalist state's contribution to the regulation

(i.e., shaping, sustaining, and undermining) of specific accumulation regimes and

modes of growth in the capitalist society. However, the most important studies of the

second wave relate to the movement (especially popular in the USA) to 'bring the

state back in' mainly as a reaction to the Marxist class analysis of the state,

considered a basically civil society-centred. This state-centered ‘bring the state back

in’ approach put more emphases in the state activities as an administrative and

political organization and management, among other things. By the 1990s a variety

of approaches (viz. Foucauldian approaches, feminist state approaches, discourse

analyses, and stateless state theory, etc.) blossomed, but at the same time the decade

witnessed a withering away of the interest in the state theory. This is not to say that

there was a stoppage of study and research in the further analysis and exploration

of the transformation, nature and activities of the capitalist state and the new

directions it was taking under the process of capitalist globalization sine the 1970s.152

Having briefly outlined the main lines of development of state theories from

the late 1960s onward, let me point out that, generally speaking, many neo-

Marxists and Left activists have adhered to the classical legacy as

developed by Marx, Engels and Lenin on the artificial impression that the

capitalist state serves the same functions as it did before. The capitalist

social formations continue to exist as before and the social relations and

institutions associated with the capitalist state have not basically changed.

The changes that are evident in the capitalist social relations and

institutions are basically quantitative involving mainly aspects of volume or

extent. The capitalist state still performs the same functions, perhaps more

because capital is now more complex, bigger or more threatened. This kind

of one-dimensional view has misled many, for example, to see the state as

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an instrument of the ruling class. This is of course not to argue that the

capitalist state, in any social formations, does not carry out some similar

functions. Indeed, the capitalist state, in any social formations, does carry

out some similar functions. What should be stressed here concerns

precisely the specific historically specific social realities of the present-day

functions of the capitalist state in the advanced capitalist social formations.

The significance of the contributions of the recent neo-Marxists such as

Gramsci, Poulantzas, and O’Connor, of course among others mentioned

above, consists in pointing out those functions in terms of which the

modern capitalist state can substantively be described, analyzed, explained

and thus revealed.

In the light of this understanding there is little to argue against

cohesion or social harmony between conflicting social classes and the role

of the relatively autonomous state in achieving this. To reproduce the

conditions of capital accumulation and social reproduction on an ever-

increasing scale, the capitalist state is indeed in need of creating the

conditions of social harmony. As O’Connor says: “A capitalist state that

openly uses its coercive forces to help one class to accumulate capital at the

expense of other classes loses its legitimacy and hence undermines the basis

of its loyalty and support.”153 At the same time, recent commentaries on the

welfare states and budget crises highlight the crucial role of the state

intervention in the accumulation and social reproduction and accordingly

in the maintenance of the stability of the capitalist system. 154 While the

capitalist state does this important function, it certainly operates within the

limits of the capitalist system. That is to say, this state asserts a relative

autonomy and is far from being a simple instrument of the capitalist class.

VI. STATE AND GLOBALIZATION: FURTHER

DEVELOPMENTS While the present paper has mainly confined its

discourse only to the three

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afore-mentioned issues, it needs to be mentioned here that, as said earlier,

new conceptualizations, reconcetualizations and theorizations have been

made by sociologists, political scientists and others concerning the nature

of transformations of the capitalist state since the late 1970s onwards in

view of the restructuring of capitalism on a global scale. In this context it is

only in the fitness of things that a brief review should be made in respect of

the recently-arisen new discourses on the capitalist state, globalization and

the relationship between the two. The concept of globalization, it needs no

mention, has turned out to be a hydra-headed concept whose meaning(s),

content and nature are hopelessly variable depending on who and with

what theoretical predilections is conceptualizing or reconceptualizing it

and for what purpose.155 In this regard I refer briefly to the main findings

of a few recent prominent Marxist scholars, Robinson, Watson, and

Jessop, supplementing them with the analyses of some other theorists, who

have dealt with the relations of the capitalist state to globalization mainly

from the perspective historical materialism and Marxist political economy.

W. I. ROBINSON:GLOBALIZATION, THE STATE, AND CAPITALISM

Robinson, looking at the relationship from the point of view of

historical materialism, argues rightly that “the essence of globalization is

global capitalism” and the “the question of the state is at the heart of the

globalization debate.” 156 For him, the core of globalization, theoretically conceived,

comprises two interwoven processes. First, the globalization is almost culmination

of a centuries-long process of the spread of capitalist production that has displaced

all precapitalist relations ("modernization") around the world. Secondly, it implies

a transition from the 1980s and 1990s ‘from the linkage of nations via commodity

exchange and capital flows in an integrated international market, in which different

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modes of production were ‘articulated’ within broader social formations, to the

globalization of the process of production itself. Globalization denotes a transition

from the linkage of national societies predicated on a world economy to an emergent

transnational or global society predicated on a global economy’. This definition of

globalization differs from one given by Robertson, Giddens, and Waters for all of

whom it is a quantitative process of, subjectively, the deepening of global

interconnections and, objectively, the deepening of our awareness of such

interconnections. Robinson’s conceptualization assigns a ‘structural determinacy to

the global capitalist economy and posits a materialist determinacy in contrast to

Robertson's and Giddens's cultural determinacy and he does not consider the

economic, political, and cultural dimensions of globalization as ‘structurally’

independent, as Waters does in his conceptualization.157 Lysandrou provides some

support to the view that globalization process is after all embedded in global

capitalist expansion. Thus he says that globalization is the capitalist

commoditization on a global scale.

While recognizing that most pre-capitalist formations exhibited elements of commodity exchange, Marx argued that capitalism differentiates itself as a genuine commodity system by virtue of two interdependent processes having reached a critical stage of development: a ‘stretching’ of commodity relations to the point where production for the market displaces subsistence production as the primary form; and a ‘deepening’ of commodity relations such that these encompass not only goods and services but the capacities for producing them. … Globalization can best be understood as the culminating stage of these stretching and deepening processes: the former in the sense that commodity relations now embrace the entire planet and the latter in the sense that they cover not merely goods, or the capacities for producing goods, but also every other type of capacity and every other type of outcome.158

From the perspective of cultural studies, Ken argues that globalization, an

incarnation of expansionism, is “a discourse being articulated into the everyday

world by states” and globalization represents “the process of expansion of capitalist

systems in a contemporary context.” 159

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In any case, from the seventeenth-century Treaty of Westphalia (1648) into

the 1960s, capitalism expanded through a system of nation-states, creating at the

same time national structures, institutions, and agents. The nation-states in this

phase of capitalism enjoyed significant amount of autonomy to intervene in process

of distribution and could divert surplus through its institutions. The struggling

dominant and subordinate classes at the same time fought with each other to utilize

the state apparatuses for maximizing their share of social surplus. Further

development of capitalism in the early decades of the twentieth century,

accompanied by growing constraints on accumulation and social reproduction,

necessitated a measure of social regulation that could curtail at least some of the

most lethal effects of capitalism. Thus, capital was forced to ‘reach an historic

compromise with working and popular classes’ who were then strong enough to

place redistributive demands on national states and also impose some constraints

on the power of capital for its unrestricted valorization. They were able to achieve

this because national states then had “the ability to capture and redirect surpluses

through interventionist mechanisms. The outcome of world class struggles in this

period were Keynesian or "New Deal" states and Fordist production in the cores of the

world economy and diverse multiclass developmentalist states and populist projects in

the periphery ("peripheral Fordism), what Lipietz and others have called the ‘Fordist

class compromise.’”160 Thus arose capitalist restructuring of economic production,

Fordist economy of mass production and mass consumption, which ensured stability

of capitalist accumulation and social reproduction particularly from the 1940s to the

1970s. The Table No. 3 gives a brief description of the Fordist system of capitalist

economic production vis-à-vis a post–Fordist one The working class struggle, in the

Fordist economy of mass production and consumption, contributed to the rise of the

so-called Fordist state, otherwise known as Keynesian national welfare state, which

ensured, among other things, full employment and social security. To summarize in

the words of Hirsch:

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In its general tendency, the Fordist model of society was characterized by the enforcement of Taylorist mass production and mass consumption, the development of welfare state structures, and Keynesian state intervention aimed at growth and full employment. The Fordist mode of accumulation - mainly centered on the development of the internal national market - entailed a long wave of prosperity in the capitalist core. This and the system of international money and credit regulation based on the Bretton Woods agreement guaranteed by the United States ensured a relatively wide margin for independent national economic and social policies. This enabled the development of a global capitalist system that was characterized by

Table No. 3

CONTRAST BETWEEN FORDISM AND POST-FORDISM

FEATURE NO.

FORDISM POST-FORDISM

1 Mass production of homogenous goods

Small-batch-production

2 Uniformity and standardization Flexible and small-batch production of a variety of product types

3 Large buffer stocks and inventory No stocks4 Resource driven Demand driven5 Single-task performance by worker Multiple tasks6 High degree of job specialization Elimination of job demarcation7 No job security High employment security for

core workers; no job security for temporary workers

8 Spatial division of labor Spatial integration9 Homogeneization of regional labor

marketsLabor market diversification

10 Discipline of labor force Emphasis on cooperation and responsibility

Source: J. E. Short, The Urban Order (Cambridge, Mss.: Blackwell, 1996), p. 101.

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common structural features and developmental tendencies despite considerable national and regional differences, a system with relatively well functioning international regulatory mechanisms at its disposal. 'Global Fordism' thus was simultaneously the basis for a swift internationalization of capital.161

But given the contradictions and crises-prone nature of capitalism, the globalizing

processes increasingly made it structurally impossible for the nation-states to

further goals of capitalist reproduction and accumulation anymore. It be mentioned

here that, generally speaking, “the internationalization of capital was an essential

factor contributing to the final demise of the Fordist system of national and inter-

national regulation.”161 Capitalism on a global scale with one single capitalist mode

of production – a transnational capitalist mode of production-- was in formation.

“In the emerging global economy, the globalization of the production process breaks

down and functionally integrates these national circuits into global circuits of

accumulation. Globalization, therefore, is unifying the world into a single mode of

production and a single global system and bringing about the organic integration of

different countries and regions into a global economy. The increasing dissolution of

space barriers and the subordination of the logic of geography to that of production,

what some have called ‘time-space compression,’ is without historic precedence.” 162

Capitalist globalization process between 1970s and 1980s replaced a Fordist regime

of accumulation that resulted in the dismantling of the Keynesian welfare and

developmental state. Against this backdrop rose what has been called the

transnational state (TNS) under the post-Fordist production under flexible

accumulation regime of capitalism. The Fordist regime of accumulations began

withering away and the termination of the "welfarist" or Keynesian "class

compromise" came to rest on the power acquired by transnational capital over

labor in the process of globalization under the new patterns flexible production and

accumulation.163 All this came in the wake of so-called ‘Washington consensus’

(1989), Cancun Conference (1982), and the debt crisis of the 1980s calling for

global economic and political restructuring centered on market liberalization and

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Imposition of structural adjustment programs on the developing societies around

the globe. “Between 1978 and 1992 more than 70 countries undertook 566

stabilization and structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and the

World Bank. These programs massively restructured the productive apparatus in

these countries and reintegrated into global capitalism vast zones of the former

Third World, under the tutelage of the emergent TNS.”164 The features of the

Fordist and post-Fordist capitalist production are depicted the following Table No.

4:

Table No. 4

FEATURES OF THE FORDIST AND POST-FORDIST STATE

No FORDIST STATE POST- FORDIST STATE1 Regulation Reregulation2 Rigidity Flexibility3 Collective Bargaining Local or Firm-based negotiations4 Socialization of labor Privatization of collective needs and

security5 Centralization Decentralization and increase of

interregional and intercity competition6 “Subsidy” state “Entrepreneurial” state7 Indirect intervention in markets

through income and price policiesDirect intervention in markets through procurements

8 Industry-led innovation State-led innovation9 National regional policies “Territorial” regional policies

Source: Short, op. cit., p. 118

To quote Robinson for emphasizing the process of transition to the post-Fordist

state based on flexible capitalist production and accumulation on a more extended

scale:

Capital began to abandon earlier reciprocities with labor from the 1970s on, precisely because the process of globalization has allowed it to break free of nation-state constraints. These new labor patterns are facilitated by globalization in a dual sense: first, capital has exercised

52

its power over labor through new patterns of flexible accumulation made possible by enabling "third wave" technologies, the elimination of spatial barriers to accumulation, and the control over space these changes bring; second, globalization itself involves a vast acceleration of the primitive accumulation of capital worldwide, a process in which millions have been wrenched from the means of production, proletarianized, and thrown into a global labor market that transnational capital has been able to shape. … The dissolution of the "welfarist" or Keynesian "class compromise" rests on the power acquired by transnational capital over labor that is objectively transnational but whose power is constrained and whose subjective consciousness is distorted by the continued existence of the system of nation-states. Here we see how the continued existence of the nation-state serves numerous interests of a transnational capitalist class. …For instance, when the IMF or the WB condition financing on enactment of new labor codes to make workers more "flexible," or on the rollback of a state sponsored "social wage," they are producing this new class relation … The shift in the 1980s from firm to state financed research and development and from the state as a provider of social subsidies to a subsidizer of private business, as well as the state's withdrawal from social reproduction through deregulation/re-regulation (from "rigidity" to "flexibility"), the privatization of collective needs, and the lifting of rules and regulations that hinder market forces, all resulted in an increase in state services to, and subsidization of, capital, and underscored the increased role of the state in facilitating private capital accumulation.165

Calling for an abandonment of nation-state centrism, Robinson forcefully argues

that now the key feature of the contemporary epoch is the “supersession of the

nation-state as the organizing principle of capitalism, and with it, of the interstate

system as the institutional framework of capitalist development’.”166 This viewpoint

completely opposes Poulantzas’s argument to the effect that, in the words of Jessop,

“the national state will neither wither away in favor of some 'super-state' standing

over and above national states nor in favor of a borderless and stateless world

organized by multinational firms. His critique of the 'super-state' was directed

against forecasts of a 'world state' organized under US domination rather than at

the prospects of an emergent European super-state.”167 In this connection it may be

53

mentioned that Walby squarely repudiates the reality of the nation state as more

mythical than real for four precise reasons. First, there are more nations than states

in the world today; second, many presumed nation-states are actually empires;

third, in addition to states, there are diverse and significant polities; and, fourth,

polities overlap and infrequently politically saturate the territory where they are

positioned. 168 Having defined the concept of nation-state as a political and cultural

project which is based on ‘a sense of common heritage’ and ‘imagined community’,

Walby specifically argues that “there are far more nations than states. It is rare for a

territory to have one nation and the whole of that nation, and one state, and the

whole of that state. Most nations and national projects do not have a state of their

own; instead they often share a state with other nations and national projects.”169

Hedetoft comes with a different interpretation. For him, “there is no reason to think

that the nation-state will wither away, but certainly the conditions for its survival are

changing so fast that it is doubtful whether by ‘nation-state’ we mean the same as we

did 50 or 100 years ago. Both within and outside Europe nation-states and their

identity structures are being reforged by the forces of globalization which make

then into reactors to transnational processes more than the shapers of those

processes, and in the same vein make nation-states and national/cultural identities

into defensive, dependent bastions of communication, organization and

‘domesticity’.”170 After a thoroughgoing review of the concerned literature Guillén

concludes that “the most persuasive empirical work to date indicates that

globalization per se neither undermines the nation-state nor erodes the viability of

the welfare state.”171 Petras and Veltmeyer go farther than this and argues that

never has the nation-state has played a more decisive role than it has done to

promote the ideology of imperialism – globalization. “The scale and scope of nation-

state activity has grown to such a point that one needs to refer to it as the ‘New

Statism’ rather than the free market. Globalization is in the first instance a product

of the New Statism and continues to be accompanied and sustained by direct state

intervention.”172

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As far as Robinson is concerned, the restructuring of global capitalism was not

only consolidating the nation state -- basically geographical and juridical and

sometimes cultural units, usually associated with a country or nation -- but was

also transforming the nation-states into ‘national states’, at the national level, or a

'national competitive state', as Hirsch calls it.173 and is also simultaneously giving

rise to, at the global level, a transnational state (TNS), of which the national states

are ‘functional’ components.174 What does the TNS do or what is its class character?

The TNS is attempting to fulfill the functions for world capitalism that in earlier periods were fulfilled by what world-system and international relations scholars refer to as a "hegemon," or a dominant capitalist power that has the resources and the structural position that allows it to organize world capitalism as a whole and impose the rules, regulatory environment, etcetera, that allows the system to function. … Just as the national state played this role in the earlier period, I suggest, the TNS seeks to create and maintain the pre-conditions for the valorization and accumulation of capital in the global economy, which is not simply the sum of national economies and national class structures and requires a centralized authority to represent the whole of competing capitals, the major combinations of which are no longer "national" capitals. The nature of state practices in the emergent global system resides in the exercise of transnational economic and political authority through the TNS apparatus to reproduce the class relations embedded in the global valorization and accumulation of capital.175

Furthermore, for the nation state the global decentralization and

fragmentation of the production process is redefining the accumulation of

capital, and the formation of social classes, especially what is called “a process

of transnational class formation, in which the mediating element of national

states has been modified.”176

The rise of the TNS was integrally connected of with the rise and increasing

dominance of the transnational capitalist class which exercised, through a solid

complex of supranational institutions of ‘global governance’ (viz. TNCs,

International Monetary Fund, World Bank, etc.) and with the assistance of the

metropolitan states, which decisively influenced in formulating and directing the

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course of globalization. The globalization project in reality is not inevitable. It is

instituted by the transnational capitalists who, argue Petras and Veltmeyer, also

expedite the project in their interests connected with the accumulation of capital.

And precisely for this reason they prefer the term imperialism to globalization to

encapsulate what is going in the restructuration of capitalism.177 Sklair studied how

the transnational capitalist class (TCC) which, according to him, consisted of four

categories of interlocking groups such as (1)Corporate executives and their local

affiliates (the corporate fraction); (2) globalizing bureaucrats and politicians (the

state fraction); (3)globalizing professionals (the technical fraction);and

(4)merchants and media (the consumerist fraction). Needless to mention the groups

or the individuals may belong to one or more one group at a time. There is indeed

always a traffic of personnel between the groups. Sklair shows how the TCC

attempts and often succeeds to promote the interests of the transnational

corporations (TNCs) in his case studies which concern, first, the operation of the

Codex Alimentarius Commission, where corporate power is exercised in the global

politics of food; second, the defeat of corporate interests for a Multilateral

Agreement on Investment (MAI) in promoting the investment globally ; and (c)

third, the constant struggles of the global tobacco industry to defend against the

coalition against it and hence enable its pursuit of profit-making. In respect of last

Sklair unequivocally states:

The empirical evidence presented in this brief case study, however, demonstrates that, far from challenging the concept of the TCC, the case of the tobacco industry provides telling evidence for the existence of such a class and shows that its members continue to play an important role in serving the interests of global capitalism through building the economic power of their corporations, the political power of their industry and the culture-ideology of consumerism. I have argued that the TNCs and their allies are political actors and that they do achieve significant success in getting across their message that there is no alternative to global capitalism. The route to prosperity for all, the corporations argue, is through international competitiveness decided by the “free” market and “free” trade, institutions and processes that they largely

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control themselves or through their friends and allies in local and national governments and international organizations.178

If viewed in this light the national states are then transformed, under the impact of

transnational class forces, into proactive agents in the globalization process and

smoothed the global circuit of capital accumulation. It should, however, be

remembered however that the national states, serving the transnational capital, do

not become powerless or irrelevant vis-à-vis transnational capital and its global

institutions. What happens is that power of the state “shifts from social groups and

classes with interests in national accumulation to those whose interests lie in new

global circuits of accumulation. These latter groups realize their power and

institutionalize it in an emerging TNS apparatus that includes supra-national

organizations and also existing states of nation-states that are captured and

reorganized by transnational groups and become, conceptually, part of an emergent

TNS apparatus.”179 By the 1980s and 1990s within the nation-states ranging from

Sweden and New Zealand, to India, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, and the

United States transnational blocs emerged as hegemonic fractions allied to the

transnational capital. This also strengthened the nation-states under capitalist

globalization. As Robinson puts it: “Hence, national states do not disappear or even

diminish in importance and may still be powerful entities. But these states are

captured by transnational social forces that internalize the authority structures of

global capitalism. Far from the ‘global’ and ‘national’ as mutually-exclusive fields,

the global is incarnated in local social structures and processes. The disciplinary

power of global capitalism shifts actual policy-making power within national states to

the global capitalist bloc, which is represented by local social forces tied to the global

economy. … By the 1990s, the transnational capitalist class had become the

hegemonic class fraction globally.”180 Elsewhere Robinson reminds that the

interventionist role of the national capitalist state has not ceased but has assumed a

different dimension in view of its being a component of the TNS under the

superintendence of the TCC.

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These neo-liberal states as component elements of a TNS provide essential services for capital. National governments serve as transmission belts and filtering devices for the imposition of the transnational agenda. In addition, they perform three essential functions: 1) adopt fiscal and monetary policies that assure macro-economic stability; 2) provide the basic infrastructure necessary for global economic activity (air and sea ports, communications networks, educational systems, etc.), and; 3) provide social order, that is, stability, which requires sustaining instruments of direct coercion and ideological apparatuses. When the transnational elite speaks of "governance," it is referring to these functions and the capacity to fulfill them.181

In this connection it is important to refer to the world system theoretical approach

to the changes that are capitalism. Unlike Robinson, who speaks of the TNS as an

organizing agency for the national states to further capitalist accumulation and

social reproduction, Chase-Dunn is liberally optimist about the rise of a world state

and a need to transform the emerging global society into ‘a global democratic

commonwealth based on collective rationality, liberty, and equality’. He observes

the following without elaborating the class character of the world state and how

actually and exactly it will bring an end to globalizing capitalist reproduction and

accumulation on an ever-extending scale.

While the idea of a world state may be a frightening specter to some, I am optimistic about it for several reasons. First, a world state is probably the most direct and stable way to prevent nuclear holocaust, a desideratum that must be at the top of everyone’s list. Second, the creation of a global state that can peacefully adjudicate disputes among nations will transform the existing interstate system. The interstate system is the political structure that stands behind the maneuverability of capital and its ability to escape organized workers and other social constraints on profitable accumulation. While a world state may at first be dominated by capitalists, the very existence of such a state will provide a single focus for struggles to socially regulate investment decisions and to create a more balanced, egalitarian, and ecologically sound form of production and distribution. … The international segment of the world capitalist class is indeed moving slowly toward global state formation. The World Trade Organization is only the latest element in this process. Rather than simply oppose this

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move with a return to nationalism, progressives should make every effort to organize social and political globalization and to democratize the emerging global state.182

In this regard it should be appropriately mentioned that in recent times quite a

growing number theorists (viz. Ulrich Beck, Ronnie Lipschutz, Martin Shaw, and

Scott Turner, Glenn Kowack, Jackie Smith, Paul Wapner, etc.) have made analytic

endeavor to trace the rise of global civil society, implying that this development

presages the dawn of some form of post-Westphalian world order characterized by

the gradual erosion of the primacy and eventual eclipse of the state. Bowden

contends that this judgment is premature and counter-argues that “the vast

majority of INGOs (possibly all) are not completely autonomous organizations.

They are restricted and influenced to a certain degree by the laws, policies, and

conditions imposed upon them by the state, or states, in which they are based. These

conditions can range from restrictions placed upon the employment of foreign

nationals to the crucial issue of raising funds.”183

Levi-Faur explains the functional roles of the capitalist state in terms of a

distinction between two of its major functions of governance: steering (leading,

thinking, directing, guiding) and rowing (enterprise, service provision).

Accordingly, he suggests three capitalist orders in company with states having

specific but varying regulatory functions. This is illustrated in Table No. 5. In

Levi-Faur’s interpretation, in which the new global order may well be most aptly

characterized as ‘regulatory capitalism,’ the contemporary capitalist state still

retains its regulatory, in fact interventionist, function despite the roll back of the

state proposition implied in its neoliberal transformation under globalization

from the 1980s onward. Not without reason, therefore, does he say then that “in

regulatory capitalism, the state retains responsibility for steering, while business

increasingly takes over the functions of service provision and technological

innovation. This new division of labor goes hand in hand with the restructuring of

the state (through delegation and the creation of regulatory agencies) and the state

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Table No. 5

THE TRANSFORMATION OF GOVERNANCE AND THENATURE OF REGULATORY CAPITALISM

Types of Governance (through rule making and rule enforcement)

Laissez-FaireCapitalism(1800s-1930s)

Welfare RegulatoryCapitalism (1940s-1970s)

RegulatoryCapitalism (1980s– )

Steering (leading, thinking, directing, guiding)

Business State State

Rowing(enterprise, service provision)

Business State Business

Source: David Levi-Faur, “The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Capitalism”,The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,

598 (March 2005), p. 16.

(through delegation and the creation of regulatory agencies) and the restructuring

of business (and other societal organizations) through the creation of internal

controls and mechanisms of self-regulation in the shadow of the state…. Moreover,

new regulatory institutions, technologies, and practices are increasingly embedded

in the crowded and complex administrative structures of modern capitalist nation-

states.”184

Altvater gives corroborative support by arguing that under the process of

globalization the ‘pluriverse’ of the nation-states may be under going

transformations, but it is not withering away for a variety of reasons:

The ‘pluriverse’ of nation state, however, is undergoing profound transformation. Firstly, geopolitical unilateralism is resurging, with the result that a dominant nation state exerts its power on all the other states. This change indicates that the tendency towards a deregulated, liberal ‘geo-economy’ is countervailed by the other tendency towards a new geopolitical order with nation states of very different relational power within the world structure, and possibly towards a new form of imperial regulation, dominated by the United States. Secondly, there are states collapsing or failing or being captured by private actors such as transnational corporations or the powerful cartels of organized crime. This is the case in parts of Africa, but also in some of the transition countries of the former Soviet Union

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and in some OECD countries whose governments are highly influenced by firms or mafia-like organizations, as in the United States or Italy. Systematic grand corruption is the most usual means of capturing the state (by bribing public servants) for the private objectives of economic actors. Thirdly, the ‘orderly’ states of the OECD transform from ‘Keynesian’ interventionist states following the target of full employment and social security into ‘competition states’ following the predominant objective of increasing competitiveness in inter-place competition. Thus, the nation state does not disappear, but it is deeply changing the ‘logics of action’.185

Therefore the assertion in respect of an impending demise of the state is somewhat

premature while, on the other hand, many theorists attempted to bring back the

state several times.186 From this corrective reminder, one has to evaluate exactly how

much the nation-state has contracted in view of the rise of different international

and even national non-governmental organizations and institutions, giving way to

the emergence of the TNS or World State, as Robinson, Chase-Dunn and others

would have us believe. Wendt goes so far as to argue that a world state, possessing a

global monopoly on the legitimate use of organized violence, is inevitable. It is the

culmination of a sequence of four previous stages -- a system of states, a society of

states, world society, and collective security. The forces driving to this world state

formation are both micro and macro. “At the micro-level world state formation is

driven by the struggle of individuals and groups for recognition of their subjectivity.

At the macro-level this struggle is channeled toward a world state by the logic of

anarchy, which generates a tendency for military technology and war to become

increasingly destructive.”187 But to be sure, capitalism has inherently globalizing

potential and hence may become globalized if there is minimally a state at the

national level, rather than a world state at the global level.

Capitalism’s differentia specifica consists in the historically unprecedented fact that the capital circuits of the world market can in principle function without infringing political sovereignty. As a rule, capitalism can leave political territories intact. Contracts are concluded between private actors that form the pre-political sphere of

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a global civil society. Capitalism, then, is the condition of possibility for the universalization of the principle of national self-determination. However, the functioning of the world market is predicated, at a minimum, on the existence of states that maintain the rule of law, i.e. guaranteeing contract based private property and the legal security of transnational transactions so as to maintain the principle of open national economies. … International economic accumulation and direct political domination are disjointed. A universalized capitalist world market can co-exist with a territorially fragmented system of states.188

Before I pass on to Jessop, let me briefly summarize another Marxian evaluation of

the process of globalization, the capitalist state and their relations as they figure in the

writings of Watson.

HILBOURNE A. WATSON: THE CAPITALIST STATE AND A CRTIQUE OF THE LIBERAL THEORY OF GLOBALIZATION

Following Davis and others, and reminiscent of Robinson’s analysis, Watson

locates globalization in capitalism. Globalization, he conceptualizes, is capitalism in

the age of electronics and has two dimensions, conjunctural and structural. First,

conjunctural dimension encompasses spatial, ideological and class formation

dynamics in the recent restructuring of capitalism to overcome crisis in the process of

capitalist accumulation in the context of a number of recent developments, viz. the

collapse of the Soviet Union and Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, the tendency

toward the transformation of Communist party elites into the new ruling bourgeois

strata, the entry of more than one billion new workers and consumers into the

capitalist world market, the capitalist reforms in China and Vietnam, etc. “These

conjunctural developments have altered the political configuration of international

relations, the expansion of spheres of commodification, the intensification of the

socialization of production and private appropriation, the restructuring of the

transnational bloc of the dominant capitalist ruling forces, increasingly through the

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dominance of money and finance capital, and the dialectic of hegemony and

counterhegemony.”189 Ideologically globalization amplifies the reach and scope of

(liberal) capitalist ideas and values now embodied in neoliberalism. From the point of

view of class formation, globalization highlights rise of and contradictions in

transnational capitalist class and its fractions. That is, it refers to ‘the deepening of

the contradictory integration of certain components of transnational capitalist class

fractions through the new patterns of the concentration and centralization of old and

new forms of capital that are deployed by different national and transnational

interests. This dynamic does not abolish the law-governed process of capital rather it

intensifies the competition that drives capitalism and aggravates nationalist and other

conflicts among the capitalist class strata.’ Second, structurally globalization implies

further expansion of capitalism, which is marked by, among other things, a transition

from postwar ‘military Keynesianism’ to contemporary ‘post-Keynesian militarism’,

the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, the growth of direct foreign investment,

the expansion of international credit, the spread of the circuits of money and currency

flows, the intensification of financial speculation, the rapid expansion of corporate

and public debt, ‘the transformation of third world debt and poverty management

into a very lucrative capitalist business,’ etc. 190

In this process of capitalist restructuring through which capital searches for

new ways to overcome crisis the national state becomes transnationalized in the

context of ‘the deepening of the integration of the national state into the global

movement of capital,’ ‘the shifting upward and outward to the world level of aspects

of state decision-making’, ‘patterns of state restructuring in which states adopt

policies that are increasingly attuned to the imperatives of global capital

accumulation’, ‘the ongoing global deployment (deterritorialization) of production’,

‘the growing transparency of state sovereignty as an expression of internationalized

property relations’ and ‘the growth of transnational social relations under the power

of private (corporate) capital through neoliberal market auspices’. Watson does not

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refer to the rise of the transnational state, as Robinson suggested. But the former

agrees with the latter about the strengthening, rather than withering away, of an

interventionist state in further consolidation of both globalization and capitalist

restructuring for expanded production and accumulation.

Globalization does not mean the decline of the state but rather the restructuring of production relations of which the restructuring of the state is itself an integral part. The neoliberal notion of freeing domestic and international capital and markets from state domination is misleading and symptomatic of the liberal predisposition to disembed and externalize social relations. States have played strategic roles in facilitating historical globalization in the development of capitalism. States help to shape the agendas and mediate the contradictions around the realignment of economic, social, and political forces, nationally and transnationally, to restructure imperialism. … States provide the key infrastructures for the process with emphasis on economic, scientific, technological, political, juridical, military, and other extra-economic components that are required to reproduce the property relations of capitalism. States and the international governmental organizations they set up and through which their policies are articulated help to manage and facilitate the flows of capital via money flows, investment, currencies and trade. In the neoliberal era the shift in the power balance has favored capital and corporate capitalist interests expect states to acknowledge without ambiguity their role in

the global restructuring process. States exercise their sovereign power in a variety of treaties and in other mechanisms and institutions through which international governance is effectuated to maintain the ‘conditions of accumulation and competitiveness in various ways, including direct subsidies and rescue operations at taxpayers’ expense.’ States also enforce ‘labor discipline’ across the global economy and provide access to ‘other markets and other labor forces.’ In effect, states play key roles in facilitating capitalist competition and globalization. 191

Weiss goes so far as to affirm that, considered as whole from all points of view,

globalization has reinforced and augmented the central importance of the state. In

stead of disappearing addressless, the nation-states have emerged as pivots of global

economy and, hence, it would be “not only misleading but also unwise to give

credence to the ideas that national authorities now have less capacity, scope and

responsibility, or that states are becoming superannuated, residual powers in a

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world of multilayered governance.” 192

Watson duly draws attention to the avant-garde role played by the

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in the transformation of

capitalism, raising labor productivity but requiring less labor on an expanding scale

in the leading economic sectors, industries and services. Capital is using labor-

replacing technologies to displace increasing number of workers from both mental

and manual production. “Capitalist research and development in alternatives to the

silicon chip indicates that silicon-based microchip technology may be approaching

its effective limits for propelling the capitalist process. As such, nanotechnology

appears to be mounting a challenge to microelectronics technology. … Capital uses

technology as a technical and political instrument of class struggle.”193 In this

regard let me point to the factor of social cohesion that is now being championed by

the ideology of globalization through the neoliberal rhetoric.

While discussing the origins, character and goals of capitalist

globalization process from a historical materialist point of view , Watson also draws

attention to the ideology of liberal worldview of globalization which projects

capitalism’s unlimited accretion on a global scale as normal. It thus legitimizes the

neoliberal utilitarian belief that the greatest number of individuals stand to

maximize their greatest benefits provided they accept as true the inexhaustible

efficacy of free competitive markets in the transnational capitalist economy, which

can overcome occasional crises that it faces but which continues to produce benefits

for all apparently with no end in sight. In reality the globalization process is thus

fetishized in such a way as to give rise to a conviction among the masses that the

unfolding of globalization is an inexorable process beyond human undoing.194 This

ideology of pseudo globalism, while extorting consent of the socially excluded, has

thus the function of producing social cohesion among both the winners and the

losers.

The liberal characterization of social forms underscores liberal globalization theory as a rationalization for conquering the space and

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time that are assumed to be inhabited by non-capitalist states, nations and societies and equating the interests of capital to universal human interests. Not surprisingly, liberal globalization theory sets out to adjust the world to the logic of globalism, by pushing international relations beyond methodological nationalism (territorialism) into ‘supra-territorial’ ‘distanceless space’, announcing the end of the nation-state and sovereignty and/or drowning them in ‘postinternationality’. Liberal globalization theory fetishizes the informationalization of the production of goods and services assigns to technology an autonomous, self-directed and unstoppable momentum that supposedly propels disinterested markets and value-free capital in the direction of value-free outcomes. … Liberal idealists see globalization in terms of forms and patterns of the diffusion of capital, science, and technology to promote growth and development based on universal principles of free markets and free trade. Liberals assume that such developments naturally promote closer collaboration and understanding and bring greater benefits via income distribution, equality, justice, and even global citizenship for a new ‘global civil society’. They see an array of problems in the neocolonies as special ‘cultural’ problems that non-Western cultures pose for capitalism. Typically, liberals displace the contradictions of the uneven capitalist process that certain groups are forced to process and equate them to cultural problems that require western know-how and other forms of intervention. Neoliberals believe that contemporary globalization offers the best way to solve the problems the ‘Other’ poses for capitalist civilization.195

Others have also draws attention to the ideological dimensions of globalization in as

much as its liberal adherents attempt to imbue the society with their shared the

common set of neoliberal beliefs, values, norms and narratives. Steger mentions five

such ideologies as will promote universal welfare. First, globalization presents

liberalization and integration of global markets as natural phenomena that promote

individual freedom and material progress. Second, the onward march of

globalization is inexorable under the relentless expansion of market forces driven by

technological innovations in the (capitalist) economy. Third, globalization is beyond

human agency. That is, being preordained as it is within the context of invisible

market forces and autonomous technological determination, no one is in a position

to change the progressive movement and direction of globalization as though it is a

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transcendental force. Fourth, neoliberal ideologues argue that globalization does

good to all individuals and groups and hence represents universal interests. Finally,

it is argues that globalization further spreads democracy. The raison d'être for this is

more formal in tenor related to voting rather than actually substantive based real

political and economic equality and participation.196 All this ideological

rationalization of neoliberal globalization or neoliberalism – the latter term is

characterized by Dumenil and Levy “as a specific power configuration, the

reassertion of the power of capitalist owners, after years of control on finance: a

new discipline imposed on all other classes (on managerial and clerical personnel as

well as productive workers), and an attempt, or set of attempts, to implement a new

social compromise.”197 It has prompted Steger to say that all these so-called globalist

claims only suggest that “the neoliberal language about globalization is ideological

in the sense that it is politically motivated and contributes towards the construction

of particular meanings of globalization that preserve and stabilize existing

asymmetrical power relations. But the ideological reach of globalism goes far

beyond the task of providing the public with a narrow explanation of the meaning of

globalization. Globalism consists of powerful narratives that sell an overarching

neoliberal worldview, thereby “creating collective meanings and shaping people’s

identities.”198 The fact of the matter is that globalization, as an ideology of social

cohesion at both national and transnational levels, has played out only a limited role

in bringing about social cohesion in terms of accelerating formation ‘both of

multiple transworld solidarity networks and of cosmopolitan commitments’. In this

regard Scholte has rightly stated that, as a whole globalization, while making

territorialist and statist approaches to ‘social integration unviable’, has not yet

produced any workable alternative. This has resulted in the creation of a void that

has, as it were, “encouraged some inhabitants of our globalizing world to conclude

that ‘there is no such thing as society’.” 199 Recent resurgence in the concerned

literature of civil society provides another source of social harmony vis-à-vis

overzealous capitalist state. That is, it can be stated that under specific

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circumstances civil society can infuse spirit of consensus and cohesion among the

mass citizenry against the inroads of the capitalist state in its facilitation role for

accumulation of capital and social reproduction. Tusalem empirically researched

into whether civil society is a bane or boon in more that 60 states which had

democratic deficits earlier and developed democratic and civil society intuitions

later after election. Aware of the fact that strong civil society organizations

sometimes can produce political instability, civic strife and violence and other

negative impacts, Tusalem says the following in regard to the civil society’s positive

impacts in his finding:

Despite the critiques mounted against neo-Tocquevilleans, the findings here demonstrate that across the board a strong civil society is not only likely to deepen the degree of freedoms gained by citizens post-transition, but also to lessen state corruption, promote the rule of law, and establish greater governmental effectiveness because it counterbalances, challenges, devolves, and decentralizes state power to make it more accountable in the eyes of the public and responsive to citizen demands…. I advance here the theoretical position that density in NGO activity can promote interethnic contact among ethnically or religiously divided transitional citizens and thereby dilute intra-group nationalism. In the end, dense NGO networks promote an increased level of interethnic contact that can promote interethnic tolerance. …I argue that states with a dense NGO presence can train democratic citizens in the virtues of civility, such as toleration, cooperation, and reciprocity. Despite pronounced cleavages (religious or ethnic), NGOs

in different sectors can bridge the differences between transitional citizens with different backgrounds as they learn to coexist in the public sphere and concomitantly develop higher levels of trust. Furthermore, high NGO organizational and membership density can contribute to effective and meaningful social collaboration that lessens ideological polarization and the rigidities of social conflict. Such social collaboration is a crucial edifice which can strengthen the role of private citizens in holding their leaders and officials accountable to measurable standards and yardstick assessments that can improve state institutional performance.200

BOB JESSOP: EMBEDDING THE CAPITALIST STATEIN MULTIDIMENSIONAL GLOBALIZATION

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I now pass on to the contributions of Jessop, one of the foremost theorists on the

Marxist theories of the capitalist state, who has already been cited while discussing

the functions the capitalist state and contradictions of the CMP. Here I attempt to

cover, at some risk of certain oversimplification, a few of the more important points

that he made in regard to the enormously complex relationship between globalization

and capitalist state. Unlike Robinson and others, Jessop does not straightforwardly

trace the genesis of globalization in capitalism. For him it is open-ended and has

multifarious dimensions that make globalization almost an autonomous but complex

process. This does not mean that he never links globalization to the CMP, as will be

made clear below. For Jessop globalization is

a multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal, multiform, and multicausal process. It is multicentric because it emerges from activities in many places rather than from a single center. … It is multiscalar because it emerges from actions on many scales—which can no longer be seen as nested in a neat hierarchy but as coexisting and interpenetrating in a tangled and confused manner—and it develops and deepens the scalar as well as the spatial division of labor. Thus, what could be described from one vantage point as globalization might be redescribed (and, perhaps, more accurately) in rather different terms from other scalar viewpoints: for example, as internationalization, triadization, regional bloc formation, global city network-building, cross-border region formation, international localization, glocalization, glurbanization, or transnationalization. It is multitemporal because it involves ever more complex restructuring and rearticulation of temporalities and time horizons. This aspect is captured in the notions of timespace distantiation and time-space compression. The former process involves the stretching of social relations over time and space so that relations can be controlled or coordinated over longer periods of time (including the ever more distant future) and longer distances, greater areas, or more scales of activity. Time-space compression involves the intensification of “discrete” events in real time and/or the increased velocity of material and immaterial flows over a given distance. Globalization is clearly multicausal because it results from the complex, contingent interaction of many different causal processes. And it is also multiform. It assumes different forms in different contexts and can be realized through different strategies, neoliberal globalization being but one… . Taken together, these features mean that, far from

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globalization being a unitary causal mechanism, it should be understood as the complex, emergent product of many different forces operating on many scales.201

As a process of social change globalization has two moments, structural and

strategic. From the former point of view it comprises objective processes that create

increasing global interdependence among actions, organizations, and institutions

within various functional systems such as economy, law, politics, education, science,

sport etc and the ‘lifeword that lies beyond them’. Strategically, globalization

implies conscious attempts to encourage global coordination of activities basically in

the different functional subsystems and/or in the lifeworld Generally speaking,

globalization proceeds not according to some premeditated design. It is rather a

chaotic outcome of interaction among various strategies that have their own share in

shaping or resisting globalization ‘in a complex, path-dependent world society’.202

Globalization, when associated with circuits of capital, can increase

organizational and spatiotemporal complexity and flexibility. It can thus generate

spatiotemporal contradictions in contemporary capitalism in the long-run by

making capital accumulation a more complex and difficult process.

Its multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal, multiform, and multicausal processes enhance capital’s capacity to defer and displace its internal contradictions, if not to resolve them, by increasing the scope of its operations on a global scale; by reinforcing its capacities to disembed certain of its operations from local material, social, and spatiotemporal constraints; by enabling it to deepen the spatial and scalar divisions of labor; by creating more opportunities for moving up, down, and across scales; by commodifying and securitizing the future; by deferring past and present material problems into the future; by promoting long-term technology forecasting, organizational learning, and trust building; and by rearticulating different time horizons. These enhanced capacities can markedly reinforce tendencies toward uneven development as the search continues for new spatiotemporal displacements and new spatiotemporal fixes.203

Jessop draws attention the role of globalization in impacting on the capitalist states

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and in its accelerating the process of transnationalization of capital beyond national

frontier.

Globalization weakens the capacity of national states to guide capital’s expansion within a framework of national security (as reflected in the “national security state”), national welfare (as reflected in social democratic welfare states), or some other national project with a corresponding spatiotemporal fix. Conversely, it increases the pressures on national states to adjust to the time horizons and temporalities of mobile capital able to operate beyond their frontiers. The development of a globalizing capitalism typically intensifies the spatiotemporal contradictions and tensions inherent in the capital relation and/or its articulation and coevolution with the spatialities and temporalities of the natural and social world beyond the sphere of value relations. The increasing emphasis on speed and the growing acceleration of social life have many disruptive and disorienting effects on modern societies.204

While both Robinson and Jessop discern capital’s tendency to be transnationalized

under the process of globalization, the latter’s concept of globalization here is some

what different from that of Robinson. For instance, Robinson makes it clear that the

logic of action and motion displayed by globalization process is ultimately rooted in

capitalism and its historic transformations. The scope for an autonomous or self-

propelling capacity of globalization is much wider in Jessop than in Robinson.

Similarly, unlike Robinson, Jessop argues more emphatically that contemporary

capitalism has become more competitive than before because of the increasing

organic interdependence of the economic and extraeconomic factors in the society.

“This is linked to the growth of new technologies based on more complex

transnational, national, and regional systems of innovation, to the paradigm shift

from Fordism with its emphasis on productivity growth rooted in economies of scale

to post-Fordism with its emphasis on mobilizing social as well as economic sources

of flexibility and entrepreneurialism, and to the more general attempts to penetrate

microsocial relations in the interests of valorization. It is reflected in the emphasis now

given to social capital, trust, and communities of learning as well as to the competitive

role of entrepreneurial cities, enterprise culture, and enterprising subjects.”205 The

71

effect of globalized capitalism on the capitalist state is actually dialectical in the

sense that it both restricts in some respects and enhances in others the ambit of

authority of the capitalist state. In this matter both Robinson and Jessop are in

agreement. To quote the latter:

In many significant respects, the processes that produce globalization have undermined the effectiveness of the national state (in its postwar forms) because specific powers and capacities have become less relevant to the new spatiotemporal matrices, the reversal of the relative significance of wages as cost of production and source of demand and of money as national money and international currency as these functioned in Atlantic Fordism, and the increased significance of competition and state forms as sites of contradictions and dilemmas in a globalizing, knowledge-driven economy. Nonetheless, a restructured national state remains central to the effective management of the emerging spatiotemporal matrices of capitalism and the emerging forms of post- or transnational citizenship to be seen in multiethnic, multicultural, melting-pot, tribal, cosmopolitan, “playful” postmodern, and other identities. National states have become even more important arbiters of the movement of state powers upward, downward, and sideways; they have become even more important metagovernors of the increasingly complex multicentric, multiscalar, multitemporal, and multiform world of governance; and they are actively involved in shaping the forms of international policy regimes. 206

Jessop makes an important point about the nature of the capitalist state that

gradually emerged from the 1970s. The Keynesian welfare national state, aimed

economically, “to secure full employment in relatively closed national economies

mainly through demand-side management and regulation of collective bargaining.

And, socially, it aimed to promote forms of collective consumption that supported a

Fordist growth dynamic and to generalize norms of mass consumption. This in turn

would enable all citizens to share the fruits of economic growth and thereby

contribute to effective domestic demand within the national economy.”207 In the

wake of the rise of the ICTs, novel innovation systems, flexible production and

accumulation processes etc, this nature of the capitalist state changed with the

advent of so-called capitalist type of state --'Schumpeterian workfare postnational

72

regime' – which has the task of infusing flexibility and permanent innovation to

remain competitive in a redefined economic domain that has to depend on a number

of extra-economic factors.208 Furthermore, there is clear shift in the social policy of

the post–Fordist ‘workfare’ state in response to economic imperatives of ‘structural

competitiveness and labor market flexibility’. This is evident not only in labor

market policy but also in a whole range of other policy matters (housing policy,

learning society, etc.). “In addition, the social wage is now more and more seen as an

international cost of production rather than a source of domestic demand. This

leads to attempts to reduce social expenditure where it is not directly related to

enhanced flexibility and competitiveness within the circuits of capital. It also

involves attempts to reduce or roll back the welfare rights that were established

under the postwar class compromises associated with Atlantic Fordism.”209

But, finally, it remains to add that the newly arisen national states are no

more stable than were the nation-states before the 1970s. The reason is that

functions of the national states under the tutelage of the TNS are, to say the least,

quite contradictory. Harvey, a noted Marxist theorist, too draws attention to several

contradiction of the neoliberal state. These contradictions basically arise out of the

state’s attempts to ensure conditions of capitalist accumulation and the

consequences that follow from such attempts affecting both the individual and the

society. If the state creates necessary conditions for market and market stability, it

results in greater commoditization of more sectors individual’s life and hence

threatens individual freedom and erodes social cohesion by unleashing anomie and

resultant anti-social behaviors While it advertises virtues of open competition, it

fails to prevent consolidation of oligopolistic, monopoly and transnational power

within the transnational corporations. The neoliberal state thus produces its own

nemesis.210 The reason is not far to seek.

The neo-liberal state retains essential powers to facilitate globalization but it loses the ability to harmonize conflicting social interests within a country, to realize the historic function of sustaining the internal unity of nationally-conceived social formation, and to achieve legitimacy.

73

This helps explain the collapse of the social fabric in country after country and outbreaks of spontaneous protest among disembedded layers. The result is a dramatic intensification of legitimacy crises, a contradiction internal to the system of global capitalism.211

Needless to sate, the Marxist theories of the capitalist state contain a

paradox in view of the fact that capitalist states are in a perennial crises

understandably because they are under the inexorable regime of capitalist

globalization, called upon to perform what are essentially contradictory

functions, earlier pointed out by both O’Connor and later by Robinson.

Recently as Jessop has pointed it out this again:

Recent Marxist work also continues, of course, to relate the state to capitalism and the anatomy of civil society. This involves an important redirection of work on the state and state power. But it is precisely on this terrain that many of the unresolved problems of state theory are located. For the state is the site of a paradox. On the one hand, it is just one institutional ensemble among others within a social formation; on the other, it is peculiarly charged with overall responsibility for maintaining the cohesion of the social formation of which it is a part. Its paradoxical position as both part and whole of society means that it is continually called upon by diverse social forces to resolve society's problems and is equally continually doomed to generate 'state failure' since so many of society's problems lie well beyond its control and can even be aggravated by attempted intervention.212

The compelling conclusion becomes thus quite self-evident. And it is this in the pos-

industrial epoch of transnational information capitalism.

Marxist theories have therefore to comprehend it and find out the precisely

real essence of this paradox before it can contend with it or prescribe a therapy for

remedying the paradox. If they can do this, at least reaching a consensus amongst

them, then many of the causes of crises, contradictions, and exploitative dimensions

of capitalism can be cured and mitigated even when all these ills can not be treated

all at once assuming that human history is not coming to an end, as some one has

predicted.213 This observation derives its force all more because, as Hirsch

concluded in his review, “after the failure of revolutionary, reformist, and socialist

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models, it has, however, become difficult to speak of historical alternatives to

capitalism - so difficult, in fact, that the debate has practically come to an end.

Because there is no unequivocal, clear-cut and practical alternative to the prevailing

economic and political structures, these can only develop in long struggles and

conflicts and by way of practical experience. This spells out the contradiction that is

inherent in a strategy of 'radical reformism'.”214 Further, there are risks for making

predictions about the nature, functions and transformations of the capitalist type of

state in the fast globalizing epoch, for predictions are more likely to turn into

speculation in view of the working of many visible and not so visible forces that are

currently shaping the social order, let alone capitalist state The reasons are not far

to seek.

Politics has become a kind of a theater or a show, with politicians selling policies as they would sell soap or cars, emotional issues have bypassed the factual ones, and personalities have become more important than issues. … At the same time, political parties have become ‘catch all’ parties with very hierarchical structures, seeking power for their most loyal members, keeping up with old programs and making compromises with other parties regardless of the needs of society. … In relation to the state, political parties have become mass-integration apparatuses that do not articulate the interests of their voters, but rather try to explain the policies of the state to them… . Citizens, on the other hand, feel more independent. Old party loyalties have broken down and a kind of distrust of parties and politics prevails in society in general. At the same time alternative modes of political participation have increased. The increased support for feminist, ecological, and peace movements, together with a more traditional direct participation (often at the local level), has been labeled as the rise of new social movements. What is new in these movements is the fact that they question the ability and the right of ‘old’ political parties to run society. Often they also question the form of the party as a way of political mobilization. In the background is also ‘the silent revolution’ of emerging new postmaterial values.215

Without being run down by pessimism, let me conclude, therefore, in the words of

Dumenil and Levy: “capitalism is not the end of history.”216

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ENDNOTES

1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992), pp. xiv–xv and xviii–xix.

2. It should be kept in mind that Marx and Engels did not formulate any coherent analysis of the capitalist state. Even then, they did provide many acute historical generalizations and political insights which have indeed utilized by most Marxist theorists to develop numerous conceptualization and reconceptualization of the concept of capitalist state. See Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1991), p.29.

3. It is no longer valid, especially since the 1970s, to say that the Marxist literature on the capitalist state is inadequate. The truth of the matter is that since then its growth has been phenomenal and unabated. Here is a reasonably detailed bibliography that is mainly concerned with the different approaches (viz. liberal, classical Marxist, neo-Marxist, state derivation, corporatism, etc.) to the state in the capitalist social formation: Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes in Contemporary Capitalism (London : Verso, 1978); Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London: Quarter Books, 1978); and Class Power and State Power (London: Verso, 1983); James O’Connor, The Fiscal Crisis of the State (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973); J. Holloway and S. Picciotto, State and Capital: A Marxist Debate (London: Edward Arnold, 1978); Claus Offe, “Structural Problems of the Capitalist State,” in K. Von Beyne, et al. (eds.), German Political Studies (California Sage, 1974), Vol. 1, pp. 31-57; and “Theory of the Capitalist State and the Problem of Policy Formulation”, in L.H. Lindberg, et al. (eds.), Stress and Contradiction in Modern Capitalism (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1975), pp. 125-44; S. De Brunhoff, The State, Capital and Economic Policy (London: Pluto Press, 1978); G. Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules? (London; NLB, 1978); V. Navarro, Class Struggle, the State and Medicine (London; Martin Robertson, 1978); Ian Gough, The Political Economy of the Welfare State (London: Macmillan, 1979); E. O. Wright, Class, Crisis and the State (London: NLB, 1978); P. Corrigan (ed.), Capitalism, State, Formation and Marxist Theory (London: Quartet Books, 1980); R. J. Johnston, Geography and the State (London: Macmillan, 1982); D. Sugarman (ed.), Legality, Ideology and the State (London: Academic press, 1913); D. Wells, Marxism and the Modern State (New Delhi: Select Book Service, 1983); K.H.F. Dyson, The State Tradition in Western Europe (London: Martin Robertson, 1980); J. H. Shennan, The

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Origin of the Modern European State 1450-1725 (London: Hutchinson, 1974); B. Badie and P. Birnbaum, The Sociology of the State (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 1978); G. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978); C. Ham and M. Hill, The Policy Process in the Modern Capitalist State (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1984); G. Clark and M. Dear, State Apparatus (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984); M. Carnoy, The State and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, (1984); R. King, The State in Modern Society (London: Macmillan, 1986); G. Little join, et al., (eds.), Power and the State (London: Croom Helm, 1978); R. Scase (ed.), The State in Western Europe (London: Croom Helm, 1980); G. Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (London: Verso, 1987); R. Alford and R. Friedland, Powers of Theory: Capitalism, the State and Democracy (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1986); P. Dunleavy and B. O’Leary, Theories of the State: The Politics of Liberal Democracy (London: Macmillan, 1987); J. Anderson, (ed.), The Rise of the Modern State (Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1986); F. Burlatsky, Modern State and Politics (Calcutta; Manisha,1985); CSE State Apparatus and Expenditure Group, Struggle Over the State (London: CSE Books, 1979); C. Y. Thomas, The Rise of the Authoritarian State in Peripheral Societies (New York: MR Press, 1984); H. Goulbourne, Politics and the State in the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1979); B. Frankel, “On the State of the State: Marxist Theories of the State after Leninism” Theory and Society, 7 (1979), pp. 199-235: and D. S. Yaffi, “The Marxian Theory of Crisis, Capital, and the State”; Economy and Society, 2 (1973), pp. 186-232. Norbert Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of State Power. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993); A. Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987); Peter B. Evans et al.(eds.), Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in Its Place (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1991); The Future of the Capitalist State (London: Polity Press, 2002), and The Capitalist State (Oxford: Martin Robinson, 1983); Paul Wetherly, et al.(eds.), Class, Power and the State in Capitalist Society (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Marxism and the State: An Analytical Approach (Hampshire Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Stanley Aronowitz and Peter Bratsis, (eds.), Bringing the Capitalist State Back In (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Daniel Chernilo, A Social Theory of the Nation-State: The Political Forms of Modernity Beyond Methodological Nationalism (London: Routledge,2007); Clyde W. Barrow, Critical Theories of the State: Marxist, Neo-Marxist, Post-Marxist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Colin Hay et al.(eds.), The

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State:Theories and Issues, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005); Murray Knuttila and Wendee Kubik, State Theories: Classical, Global and Feminist

Perspectives (London: Zed Books, 2001); Steven Pressman, Alternative Theories of the State (Baskingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Eric Nordlinger, On The Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Simon Clarke, editor, The State Debate (London: MacMillan, 1991); Fred Block, Revising State Theory: Essays in Politics and Postindustrialism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); and S. Clarke(ed) , The State Debate (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).

4. To cite an example, Wernet has analyzed how gender empowerment is related to the nature and functions of different types of capitalist (welfare) states. She points out that that women-friendly states are those which that provide not only men but also women such rights, privileges, and choices that enable them as equal citizens to have a sense of security and control over their life chances in the society. “States that provide their citizens with more pro-woman rights enable their female citizens to be more independent. Practices at the state level which privilege men tend to magnify traditional gender norms and gender stratification. On the other hand practices such as those of pro-woman states may diminish these normative gendered conceptions because they provide structural opportunities for women. … Women in these countries (viz. Sweden, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and some others—BKB) typically enjoy employment, longer maternity leaves, an education, some representation in government, reproductive rights, and longer life expectancies. Interestingly, many of the pro-woman states are social democratic welfare states. … Liberal and corporatist welfare states are more likely preserve the traditional patriarchal family structure. Countries such as South Korea, Turkey, India, and Nigeria rank very low on the pro-woman index. Of the countries studied, these countries are least likely to provide women with a high school education, employment, representation in government, reproductive freedoms, family leave, and conditions that would result in longer life expectancies.” See Christine A. Wernet, “An Index of Pro-Woman Nation-States: A Comparative Analysis of 39 Countries”, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 49 (2008), pp. 60-61 and 69. Emphases added -BKB.

5. Cf. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942), p. 155.

6. The concept of the relative autonomy of the state, mainly elaborated and defended by late Poulantzas, has now been championed and accepted in the recent literature on the capitalist or dependent state.

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For conditions as well as the extent of relative autonomy, both theoretically and empirically, see the following: T. Bamat, “Relative

State Autonomy and Capitalism in Brazil and Peru”, Insurgent Sociologist, 7 (Spring 1977), pp. 74-84; E. K. Trimberger, “State Power and Modes of Production: Implications of the Japanese Transition to Capitalism”, in ibid, pp. 85-98; Miliband, Class Power and State Power, pp. 67-8; and Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 66-117; Thomas, op. cit., esp. pp. 69-79;

N. Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); and Burlatsky, op. cit., p. 62.

7. The relevant literature is quite rich and prolific on the state interventionism, especially on the interventionist role of the capitalist state. De Brunhoff correctly states that “Marx showed how the state intervenes beforehand, in the process of so-called primitive accumulation, whose violence led to the emergence of the proletarian, with only labor-power to sell, and the owner of money, the capitalist. He also showed how the state intervenes afterwards, by generalizing certain rules, particularly those governing the length of the working day without which capital would exhaust its resources of labour-power. Thus the state has an economic role both before and after the formation of circuit M-C.M.” See De Brunhoff, op. cit. p. 6. Emphases in original. See also P. Corrigan, et al., “The State as a Relation of production”, in Corrigan. (ed.), op.cit., p.9.

8. World Bank, The State in a Changing World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 1.

9. In this regard I draw extensively on the works of Althusser and Poulantzas.

10. The concept of ‘structure’ may be distinguished from the concept of ‘institution’. Whereas an institution is a socially sanctioned system of norms and rules, the concept of structure does not refer to the concrete institutions, but it (the structure) remains present in an allusive and inverted form in the institutions. As Poulantazs says, the concept of structure “covers the organizing matrix of institutions. Through the functioning of the ideological, the structure always remains hidden in and by the institutional system which it organizes.” See Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , p. 115, fn 25. Emphases in original.

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11. L. Althusser and E. Balibar, Reading Capital (London: NLB, 1976), p.94. Emphasis in original.

12. Cf. L. Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism (London: NLB, 1978), pp. 182-3.

13. For example, Marx refers to the mutual interaction in “every organic whole.” See K. Mark, Grundrisse (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 100.

14. For example, Engels writes, in a letter (September 21-1, 1890) to Bloch, about “interaction of all” elements in which the economic movement finally asserts”; he writes, in a letter (October 27, 1890) to Schmidt, about the futility of any attempt to see “only here cause, there effect” and says that “in the last instance production is the decisive factor”. See also his letter (July 14, 1893) to Mehring. See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n. d.), pp. 498, 501, 507 and 542.

15. See G. Therborn, Science, Class and Society (London: NLB, 1976, pp. 399-400.

16. L. Althusser, For Marx (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), p. 111.

17. Here I am following Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , pp. 26-7.

18. Ibid., p. 27, Emphasis in original.

19. Bob Jessop, “Capitalism and Capitalist Type of State”, in The Future of the Capitalist State (Cambridge: Polity 2002), p.15.

20. Two points may be noted here. First strictly speaking the juridical structures (the law) and the political structures (the state) should be considered two separate instances. The political structures consist of the institutionalized power of the state. In any case, the Marxist classics have definitely established the close relationship between the juridical and political structures. Second, the state and the political essentially correspond to the formation of social classes. See ibid., pp. 42, fn 8 and 52, fn 28(c).

21. Ibid., pp. 206-7.

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22. Class relations are social relations of production, i.e. relations among the agents of production distributed in social groups as social classes.

23. For further elaboration, see Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, pp. 125-35 and 274-5.

24. This is based on the definition by Schachter who says that “the social forces that draw and keep men together may be called cohesion or cohesiveness”. See Stanley Schachter, “Social Cohesion”, in D. L.

Sill, (ed.), International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan, 1968), Vol. 2, p. 542. Elsewhere cohesion is defined, among other things, as “the force with which the molecules of a body cleave together”. See C. T. Onions, (ed.), The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 364.

25. However, I propose to concentrate here on the contributions of Gramsci only.

26. Jessop discovers rudimentary elements of cohesion in the theory of the state as formulated in the works of Marx and Engels. See Jessop, The Capitalist State, pp. 16-20.

27. Cf. Engels, op. cit., p. 155.

28. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 337.

29. K. Marx, The Civil War in France (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1970), p. 64.

30. Ibid., pp. 166, 171 and 227.

31. John Sanderson, “Marx and Engels on the State,” Political Research Quarterly 16 (1963), p. 947.

32. Marx, The Civil War in Franc, p. 17.

33. V. I. Lenin, The State (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1975), p. 11.

34. V. I. Lenin Selected Works in Three Volumes (Moscow; Progress Publishers, 1967), Vol. 2, p.335.

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35. This is also the view of Althusser who says: “The state apparatus, which defines the state as a force of repressive execution and intervention ‘in the interest of the ruling classes’ in the classes

struggle conducted by the bourgeoisie and its allies, is quite certainly the state, and quite certainly defines its basis ‘function’”. See L. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 137. Similarly, the force or conquest theory of the state formation cannot be supported from the Marxist point of view. “The conquest theory failed as a general theory of the

origin of the state because it introduced only external factors, and failed to take account of internal processes in the formation of a given state. Migration of a bellicose people to the vicinity of a peaceable one or the converse, and subsequent conquest by the former of the latter does not in itself lead to class stratification and state formation. There must also have been beforehand at least the germ of social stratification, of an administrative system, of an ideology of superiority and of rulership, and of a burgeoning economy with some differentiations of economic functions. The Eskimo and neighboring Chukchi, for instance, made war upon each other, with occasional conquests, but we do not speak of Chukchi or Eskimo state.” See L. Krader, Formation of the State (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Preniice-Hall, 1968), p. 45.

36. K. Marx and F. Angels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), p. 66.

37. Ibid., pp. 64-5.

38. The importance of the cohesive role of the capitalist state has been emphasized by other writers as well. For instance, Johnston argues that, although the state could try to create unity by force, it is more likely that the state would attempt “to foster unity by appeals to common ties to the concept of the nation. Thus the state has an ideological role as the focus of national life, with individuals accepting that loyalty to the nation (through the state) as sometimes more important than self-interest. The state is the adhesive that keeps the members of society united countering fissiparous tendencies.” See Johnston, op. cit., p. 13, Emphasis added.

39. A. Showstack Sassoon, “Hegemony and Political Intervention”, in S. Hibbin, (ed.), Politics, Ideology and the State (London: Lawrence Wishart, 1978), p. 12. Emphasis in original .

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40. See, for details, Roger Simon, Gramsci’s Political Thought: An Introduction (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1982), pp. 68–70.

41. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith, “State and Civil Society; Introduction” in A. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci , ed. and trans. Q. Hoare and G. N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1978), p. 207.

42. Michael Burawoy, “For a Sociological Marxism: The Complementary Convergence of Antonio Gramsci and Karl Polanyi,” Politics & Society, 31 (June 2003), p. 211.

47. Brett Bowden, “Civil Society, the State, and the Limits to Global Civil Society”, Global Society, 20 (April, 2006), p. 169.

44. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 261. In this connexion it may be said that in Gramsci’s writings variations in his conceptions of the state match variations in his conceptions of civil society.

45. Ibid., p. 160. It is not irrelevant to mention here that, unlike classical Marxists who think that those who own means of production possess power, Gramsci holds “what might be described as a Foucauldian view of power relations. Thus, power is not in situ but fluid, running in circuits or matrices, and wherever there is power there is an automatically created element of resistance to it—an opposing power. It follows, then, that the social relations within civil society and the relations between civil society and the state have given rise to a wide variety of social movements, engaging in everything from popular-democratic struggles to the advancement of single-issue causes… . Gramsci’s ideas should not be interpreted as positing civil society and its constituent parts in permanent direct opposition to the state, for this is not the intended setting.” See Bowden, op.cit., p. 168. Emphases added.

46. Burawoy, op. cit., p. 211.

47. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , pp. 124-5.

48. Cf. K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress Publishers 1972), pp. 104-5.

49. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , p. 135.

50. Poulantzas has correctly indicated that the “separation” of the civil society and the state in Gramsci, as also in the young Marx, “ depends on its contrast with the conception of feudal relations characterized

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by a ‘mixedness’ of instances: Gramsci treats this ‘mixedness’ in his economic-corporate’ theme. Thus he uses the concept of hegemony in

order to distinguish the capitalist social formation from the ‘economic-corporate’ feudal formation. … It (economic-corporate-BKB) indicates not only the ‘mixed’ economic/ political relations of the feudal formation, but also the ‘economic’ (as distinct from the political) element in capitalist formations.” See ibid. pp. 139-40.

51. Cf. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 54.

52. Burwoy, op.cit., p.215.

53. Gramsci, op. cit, p. 243.

54. Ibid., p. 244. Emphases added.

55. Ibid., p. 407.

56. For deficiencies of Gramsci’s treatment of the status of ideology in the ‘historical bloc’ and of ideology’s cementing role, see Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , pp. 200 and 207-8.

57. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 377.

58. Ibid., pp. 12-3, In his work Miliband demonstrates how the various private institutional agencies such as relation, press and other media, educational institutions, the family, etc, have served as leading agencies of ideological dissemination. Their function is to secure the acceptance by the dominated classes of the existing social order on the one hand and to legitimate the rule of the dominant class, on the other. For details see Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society , pp. 161-236.

59. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 258.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., p. 260.

62. Benedetto Fontana, “Gramsci on Politics and State,” Journal of Classical Sociology, 2 (2002), p. 161.

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63. Ibid., p.168.

64. “Hegemony is the concept created by Gramsci to refer to ‘the successful mobilization and reproduction of the ‘active consent; of the dominated groups by the ruling class through their exercise of intellectual, moral and political leadership.’… This process is not simple indoctrination or the imposition of ‘false consciousness’, but involves the bourgeoisie claiming popular, not just class, sentiments for its ‘national’ goals. It involves an organization of popular culture

and its direction and appropriation for class goals.” See King, op. cit., p. 74.

65. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 161.

66. Ibid.

67. Ibid., pp. 181-2.

68. Ibid., p. 182.

69. Cf. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , p. 2-3.

70. Roland Axtmann, “The State of the State: The Model of the Modern State and Its Contemporary Transformation,” International Political Science Review, 25(2004), p.271.

71. Derick W. Brinkerhoff, “Exploring State—Civil Society Collaboration: Policy Partnerships in Developing Countries”, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 28 (1999), p. 83.

72. M.W. Foley and B. Edwards, “The paradox of civil society,” Journal of Democracy, 7 (1996), p. 48.

73. The word ‘autonomy’ and ‘independence’ are often used interchangeably. For example, see Miliband, Marxism and Politics, p. 83. Further, a particular line for Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, quoted by Miliband in his afore-mentioned book, reads as follows: “Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seen to have attained a completely autonomous position” (p. 84, emphasis added.). The same line elsewhere reads as follows: “Only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent”. See Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of

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Louis Bonaparte , p. 105. Emphasis added. I would generally use the word autonomy.

74. For details, see Barrow, op.cit, p.13-50.

75. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, p. 80.

76. Marx and Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 337.

77. Lenin, Selected Works in Three Volumes , Vol. 2, p. 274.

78. For example, Sweezy refers to the state as “an instrument in the hands of the ruling classes for enforcing and guaranteeing the stability of the class structure itself”. See P. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Monthly Review, 1970), p. 243. The basic point of instrumentalist viewpoint is that, through the instrumentality of the state apparatus, capitalists can frame and implement policies that secure their long-term class interests. The state is, therefore, sort of an instrument in the hands of the capitalists to serve their interests .

79. Cf. B. Jessop, “Marx and Engels on the State”, in Hibbin (ed.), op. cit., p. 50.

80. As Marx says, the working classes cannot “simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”. Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 64.

81. See Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society , passim. For recent changes in his position see his Marxism and Politics, where he admits of the relative autonomy of the capitalist state, p. 83.

82. N. Poulantzas, “The problem of the Capitalist State”, in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science (Glasgow: Fontana, 1975) p. 245. Emphases in original.

83. For Marx’s two views on the state see R. Miliband, “Marx and the State”, in T. Bottomore (ed.), Karl Marx (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973), pp. 128-50.

84. Miliband, Marxism and Politics, pp. 83 and 87.

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85. See footnote no. 56.

86. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , p. 103.

87. Ibid., p. 104, Emphases in original.

88. Ibid., p. 105

89. Cf. Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 251.

90. Engels, op. cit., p. 157.

91. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1951), Vol. II, p. 290.

92. Marx, The Civil War in France, p. 66.

93. This is not to say that Poulantzas dismisses the state’s autonomy in a general of catastrophic equilibrium of social forces, enabling the state to perform the role of an arbitrator between these social forces. See his Political Power and Social Classes , p. 262.

94. See ibid., pp.143 and 259. It may be mentioned tat I follow Poulantzas’s concept of the capitalist state as a type of state “in which the capitalist is dominant (just as the term capitalist social formation denotes a formation in which the CMP is dominant)”. See ibid., p. 144.

95. Ibid., p. 256.

96. Ibid., pp. 284 and 297. See also Engels’ letter to Marx, wherein Engels clearly notes the inability of the bourgeoisie to organize them politically. See Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 2-4.

97. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , pp.. 284 and 287.

98. Ibid., pp. 188-9, 191, 284 and 287-8.

99. For the state’s role as a factor of the political unity of what Poulantzas calls power bloc, that is, the coalition of the politically dominant classes and fractions under the domination of a hegemonic class or fraction in them, and for the state’s role as the organizing factor of the interests of the power bloc, see ibid., pp. 297-301.

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100. Ibid., pp. 285-6 and 288.

101. Ibid., p. 288.

102. Ibid., p. 285. Emphasis in original.

103. Joachim Hirsch, “Nation-State, International Regulation and the Question of Democracy” Review of International Political Economy, 2 (Spring, 1995), p. 271.

104. See Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes , p.192 for details, Emphases added.

105. Ibid., p. 289. See also footnote no. 2 in this paper.

106. Society refers to socio-economic relations, i.e. in the field of class practices, to the economic class struggle. See Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes, p. 134.

107. The form assumed by dislocation between the state and the economic class struggle is one in which the state assumes a specific autonomy vis-à-vis socio-economic relations by putting itself as the representative of the unity of the people. The function of the juridical and political instances is in brief to present the agents of production as juridico-political subjects and persons, thus concealing the fact that the relations between the agents are in fact social relations. For details, see ibid., pp. 135, 275 and 281.

108. Ibid., p. 282. Emphases in original.

109. Ibid., p. 302. Emphases in original. In this connexion it is instructive to note Therborn’s important analysis that gives, if at all, a lesser degree of autonomy to the Bonapartist state “In saying that the bourgeoisie lost the political power to Bonaparte, Marx did not mean that Bonapartism had ceased to represent the class position of the bourgeoisie – just as the Restoration regime had been the state power of the newly-bourgeois landowners, and the July Monarchy that of the financial bourgeoisie; he was merely indicating the fact that a parliamentary system of bourgeois notables had been replaced by an authoritarian state. These equivocations culminate in the dictum that Bonapartism ‘was the only form of government possible at a time when the bourgeoisie had already lost, and the working class had not yet acquired, the faculty of ruling the nation’. In the very next

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sentence Marx goes on to talk of the prospering of bourgeois society under the Second Empire. In reality, Bonapartism expressed not an equilibrium or vacuum of classes, but the power of the big bourgeoisie in a new political conjuncture. Before the advent of Bonaparte, the working class had been decisively defeated in June 1848 by the bourgeois republic. Bonaparte’s presidential candidacy and latter coup d’état were supported by the big bourgeoisie; the top political personnel of the Second Empire were largely recruited from its ranks; and the imperial state actively furthered its development. The Bonaparist imperial state was, in fact, less distanced or ‘autonomous’ from the big bourgeoisie than the Third Republic”.

Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules?, pp. 199-200. Emphases in original.

110. It should be remembered that from their own methodological and theoretical viewpoints, Marx and Engels convincingly argue “that different forms of state and state intervention are required by different modes of production and that the nature of the state power is determined by the changing needs of the economy or the changing balance of class forces. In this approach, different forms of state and state intervention are required at different stages in capital accumulation. For example, a less interventionist state is appropriate at the height of competitive capitalism, which contrasts to the absolutist form required during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, or the more authoritarian state which emerges with the development of monopoly capitalism”. See King, op. cit., pp. 63-4.

111. For useful summary, see Barrow, op. cit, pp. 51-76.Here it should be mentioned that another theoretical approach, better known as derivationist approach based on capital-logic school, further refined the capitalist state’s interventionist role. See Holloway and Picciotto, op.cit., passim.

112. E.S. Malecki, “The Capitalist State: Structural Variation and its Implications for Radical Change”, The Western Political Quaterly , 34 (June 1981), p. 248.

113. For instance, Poggi argues that “the state was enjoined from interfering in the market except in such generalized ways as by regulating the money system or the machinery for the enforcement of contracts; the reason for this was that the nineteenth century market was capable of doing on its own terms nearly all the allocating that needed to be done, and in doing so autonomously directed the

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process of production and accumulation to the advantage of ‘capital owners.” See Poggi, op. cit., p. 119.

114. King writes: “Clearly, the nineteenth century liberal state, the first in which industrialists played a significant role, was not a laissez-faire state. It displayed active and often aggressive tendencies to intervene both in the economy and in social life. Wolfe suggests that ‘the accumulative state’s role during this period of expansion was: to define the broadest parameters of economic activity, preserve discipline in order to increase production, adjust macro-economic conditions, provide direct subsidies to private industrialists, and to

fight wars. Moreover, the new bourgeoisie in Britain were quick to turn to Parliament to reform and unify the existing localized forms of social control which did not fit well with the requirements of an emerging capitalist society”. King, op cit., p. 91. The truth of the matter is that, as Therborn suggests, “the state was always an essential part, and not merely an external guardian, of the reproduction of the economy”; however, it is to be noted, “the range and modality of state intervention in the economy vary greatly according to the nature and stage of development of the mode of production”. See Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules? p. 165. He discusses the state’s general interventionist role in different modes of production including the feudal mode of production. A pertinent point relates to the absolutist state’s undeniable role in the development of capitalism. Anderson and Hall rightly stress the point that “mercantilism, the dominant economic doctrine under absolutism, involved the state taking an active role in the expansion of industry and commerce, the lowering of internal barriers to trade and the protection of it industries from external competition.” J. Anderson and S. Hall, “Absolutism and other Ancestors”, in Anderson (ed.), The Rise of the Modern State , p. 31. For excellent discussion on the nature of the absolutist state in developing capitalism within the contours of the declining feudalism, see Perry Anderson, “The Absolutist State in the west,” in his Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1980), pp. 15-42, and Wells, op. cit., esp. pp. 110-18. In brief, the role of the absolutist state in promoting modern capitalist development may be summarized as follows: ‘In the first place, the securing of public order and guaranteeing of private property rights in the immediate historical context of feudal jurisdictional disputes, internecine dynastic disputes, peasant unrest, fiscal weakness of the state and poor communication, required not simply state intervention to ‘hold the ring’ and maintain ground rules, but a more obtrusive presence to define and enforce rules of public order and property rights, and to find means of financial support for state activities. In the second place, within a European

context of competing nation-states, strong government was important not merely for the protection of national integrity, but also for the protection and promotion of a range of economic, political and military projects of developmental significance. These range from the protection of home industries and the construction of national markets, to the acquisition and defense of territory and the economic resources it contained. Whether or not statements and bureaucrats aimed at the explicit creation of capitalist social relations, it is possible to regard such activities as conducive to, and in some cases constitutive of, certain features of capitalist social relations”. See R. J. Holton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1985), p. 171.

115. See Albert Szymanski, The Capitalist State and the Politics of Class (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1978), pp. 144-6; and Poulantzas, Classes in Comtemporary Capitalism , p. 100.

116. State intervention has taken on new significance especially in monopoly capitalism, and has been subject to various interpretations. Even then, the common factor underlying these interpretations emphasize ever increasing state intervention to counter impediments to accumulation process and sustain continuous concentration and centralization of capital at both nation and international levels. King focuses on the new from of state intervention in this way: “In the monopoly stage of capitalism, rather than simply securing the general conditions of capital accumulation (e.g. stable monetary system, good communications), the state intervenes directly in both production and the reproduction of labor power. Political institutions take over the major responsibility for the reproduction of capitalist relations from economic agencies, although this carries attendant dangers for the state and capital as the state becomes firmly embedded in periodic capitalist crises. It is forced to take more direct responsibility for securing the interests of capital which may require actions that threaten its ‘popular-legitimating’ function. Moreover, it is prevented from intervening too directly into the economy for fear of socializing the means of production. The state is thus forced into a series of reactive and often incoherent strategies that reduce its effectiveness and legitimacy”. See King, op. cit., pp. 78-9. Erik Olin Wright cites the various reasons for greater state intervention for removing impediments (viz. growth of unproductive expenditures, tendency of the capitalist class to increase the rate of exploitation to compensate for the overgrowth of unproductive

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expenditures due to workers’ demand, continued concentration and centralization of capital, etc.) that have surfaced in the era of late capitalism. In the crises capitalism is facing “the emergent long-run solution is to move from predominantly Keynesian interventions (e.g. collective bargaining, economism, welfarism, social and unemployment insurance, etc. - BKB) in the economy to active state involvement in the production process itself. Qualitatively new forms of state intervention are called for. It is no longer enough for the state simply to set the parameters for capitalist production by regulating aggregate demand, interest rates and taxes, and to deal with the social costs generated by the irrationalities of capitalism through police, pollution control and mental hospitals. The state needs to become directly involved in the rationalization of production, the coordination and planning of productivity increases, the destruction of inefficient sectors of production, and so forth. It is, of course, difficult to give precise descriptions of the forms such new interventions will take. The minimal steps would include direct state participation in the planning and allocating of resources for investments. … More pervasive forms of such production interventions would include the state directly organizing modernization of production processes in heavy industry, either through outright nationalizations or through the creation of various kinds of co-planning boards involving the state and private capital (and perhaps labor and ‘consumers’ as well). Given that in monopoly capitalism the classic mechanisms of advancing productivity – bankruptcies, devaluation of capital, etc. - are too costly politically and too disruptive economically, the state will eventually have to take the responsibility of directly increasing productivity. In order to accomplish such rationalizations, the state will have to increase its capacity to control and discipline individual capitalists and the working class. In the case of capital, this means above all being able to prevent the flight of capital in the face of increasing state involvement in investments as well as being able completely to eliminate unproductive sectors of capital (especially small and medium capital), in the interests of increasing productivity of capital as a whole. In the case of the working class, it will be necessary severally to constrain wage and employment demands for an extended period of time, in order to increase the rate of surplus value necessary to pay for such rationalizations of production”. See Wright, op. cit., pp. 177-8. Emphases added. For an example of increased interventionist role of the state in America and other European countries, see Therborn, What Does the Ruling Class Do When it Rules? pp. 166-7.

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117. Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism , p. 100. For the German debate, especially state derivation (capital logic and materialist) approaches, see Holloway and Picciotto, op. cit., passim; Carnoy, op. cit., pp. 128-52; and G. L. Clark and M. Dear, State Apparatus (Boston: Allen & Unwin, 1984), pp. 14-47.

118. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 750.

119. Sweezy, op. cit., p. 249. As a matter of fact capitalism implies the concept of interventionist state, without whose existence capitalist economy would cease to be operative. See Clark and Dear, op. cit., p. 4.

120. See K. Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1970), Vol. 1, pp. 264-302; and Engels’ views on Marx’s discussion in this respect in their work, Selected Correspondence, p. 507.

121. K. Marx and F. Angels, Selected Works in Three Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), Vol. 3, p. 147.

122. Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society , pp. 216-17; and Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays , pp. 132-3.

123. Szymanski, op. cit., p. 246.

124. Roland Axtmann,” The State of the State: The Model of the Modern State and Its Contemporary Transformation,” International Political Science Review 25 (2004),p. 271.

125. Adam Crawford, “Networked governance and the post-regulatory state? Steering, rowing and anchoring the provision of policing and security,” Theoretical Criminology, 10 (2006), pp. 455-6.

126. Ibid., p.471.

127. Offe, “The Theory of Capitalist State and the Problem of Policy Formulation”, p. 132; and Poggi, op. cit., pp. 129-30. As I have already hinted (see footnote no. 92), the state’s direct intervention for securing profitability and accumulation for the capitalist class has amounted to the state’s development in late capitalism as a counter tendency to capitalism’s crises. This marks “a shift from general Keynesian macro-economic management to direct state intervention through loans, subsidies, and the formation of state

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capitalist enterprises.” This trend of the transformation of the capitalist state into a corporatist state has emerged as the latest form assumed by the capitalist state in advanced monopoly capitalism. Corporatism “implies a direct intervention by the state in the relationship between wage labor and capital; it attempts to reduce the intensity of class struggle by the institutionalization of industrial relations and the corporation of subordinated classes.” See R. Scase, “Introduction”, in R. Scase (ed.), op. cit., p. 18. The nature and consequences of the emergence of the corporatist state, along with its

new role of direct intervention within the parliamentary democratic context, may be summarized in the words of Jessop: “Corporatism is a system of representation in which capital and wage-labour are entitled to participate in the formulation and implementation of state intervention in the economy and in other matters relevant to capital accumulation. Such participation is conditional on the ‘corporations’ concerned accepting the legitimacy of the overall system within which they operate, i.e. confining themselves to an ‘economic-corporate’ role. This means such participation involves accepting the imperatives of capital accumulation and subordinating all policies to those imperatives. At the same time corporatism does provide a mechanism for the representation of specific interests at an economic-corporate level and their consideration in the formulation of a general program of state intervention. …Insofar as participation in a corporatist system depends on accepting an economic-corporate role and the renunciation of economic strike power in favour of political representation, corporatism should weaken working class organization at the point of production through the transfer of bargaining from shop stewards and rank-and-file movements to national trade union leaders and from the firm or industry to the national political arena. …Corporatism is necessary to capital accumulation because it is a mechanism of representation appropriate to the interventionist state in the post-Keynesian period of the mixed economy and welfare state. For, once intervention goes beyond monetary and fiscal contra-cyclical measures coupled with full employment and welfare benefits, it is necessary to secure the active and continuous involvement of labor as well as capital (the former having been much longer involved) in economic intervention. Parliamentarism is necessary to provide a forum for popular-democratic struggles beyond the ambit of economic intervention and to secure the legitimacy and popular accountability of state intervention. But corporatism is associated with the centralization and concentration of state power and with the consolidation of the domination of monopoly capital. Parliamentary government, on the

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other hand, is associated with local representation which favors small and medium capital as well as regionalized or localized minority interests. Thus monopoly capital has stronger interests in promoting corporatism, small and medium capitals have stronger interests in promoting parliamentarism. Likewise, if there is much scope for the democratization of the ‘corporations’, there is also a strong interest on the part of popular-democratic movement with concerns outside the relations of production to defend parliamentarism against the encroachments of corporatism. But one should also note here that corporatist forms of representation are emerging at local and regional level; this is linked with the centralization of local power and its insulation from popular control through the reorganization of the local state. …Corporatism in Britain involves strengthening the existing labor and employer organizations as vehicles of political representation. And it has developed out of the post-war Keynesian political economy rather than from the pre-war depression. If the Keynesian mixed economy and welfare state represent the first stage of social democracy as a form of state, corporatism represents its second and highest state . Moreover, whereas Keynesian policies simply involve the accommodation of organized labor and its representation through parliament, corporatism involves the integration of organized labor into the administration so that it becomes a quasi-non-governmental organizational complex. Likewise, whereas the success of the Keynesian political economy depended on material concessions to labor, and thus on continued capital accumulation, corporatism requires the hegemonization of organized labor and its mobilization in support of accumulation”. See B. Jessop, “Capitalism and Democracy: The Best Possible Political Shell ?”, in Littlejoin, et al., (eds.), op. cit., pp. 39-42; and see also Wells, op. cit., esp. pp. 86-99.

128. Cf. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 97. See also Hugh Mosley, “Is There a Fiscal Crisis of the state”, Monthly Review, 3 (May 1978), p. 34.

129. O’Connor, op. cit., p. 8.

130. Ibid., p. 101.

131. Ibid., pp. 7 and 24.

132. Ibid., p. 138. Emphases in original.

133. Jessop,The Future of the Capitalist State, p.10595

134. Ibid.,

135. Ibid., pp. 12-14. Emphases in original.

136. Ibid., p.21 and 37.

137. Ibid., pp. 42-3. Emphases added.

138. Ibid., p. 43.

139. Norah A. MacKendrick and Debra J. Davidson, “State–Capital Relations in Voluntary Environmental Improvement,” Current Sociology, 55 (September 2007), p.691.

140. Ibid., p. 675. Emphases added.

141. Ronald C. Kramer, Raymond J. Michalowski and David Kauzlarich, “The Origins and Development of the Concept and Theory of State-Corporate Crime,” Crime Delinquency, 48 (April 2002), p.265

142. Ibid., pp.265-6

143. Ibid., pp. 269-70.

144. Ibid., p. 278-9

145. World Bank, op. cit., p. 99.

146. D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 73.

147. Fred Block, “Swimming Against the Current: The Rise of a Hidden Developmental State in the United States”, Politics & Society, 36(2008), p. 170.

148. Ibid.

149. Ibid., p. 172.

150. Ibid., p. 175.

151. Ibid. p.198.

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152. For critical and rewarding review of development of different currents of research interest in the studies of capitalist state, see Bob Jessop, “Brining the State Back in (Yet Again): Reviews, Revisions, Rejections and Redirections”, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA14YN,2003, pp.1-23.

153. Ibid., p. 6.

154. However, there is a limit beyond which the capitalist state cannot aid accumulation of capital, even though corporatism is in operation. “If increasing direct state intervention and corporatism are responses to

the crisis of profitability this, in turn, has created a fiscal crisis for the state. Its activities have become ‘overextended’ when the sources available for the funding of its operations have become more restricted; deficit budgeting causes inflation while a reduction in the living standards of wage labor limits the scope for further revenue through taxation”. See Scase, op. cit., p. 18. For full elaboration of the fiscal crisis in the USA, see O’Connor, op. cit., passim.

155. In his study of globalization trends across the world Pieterse draws attention to two markedly different waves of recent globalization: (a) 1980–2000 and (b) 2000–present in terms of comparison of two waves with regard to trade, finance, international institutions, hegemony and inequality in the respective phases. In this regard, he advances two main arguments. First, Pieterse suggests that in the 1980-2000 globalization phase the United States, Europe and Japan rode the first wave of globalization in which ‘the United States set the rules, in economics, through the Washington consensus, in trade, through the WTO, in finance, through the dollar standard and the IMF, and in security, through its hegemony and large military’. But in the second wave these winners are ceding more to the emerging nations in Asia including China and India. The second wave of twenty-first century globalization is showing ‘the frailty of neoliberalism and the resilience of mixed economies’. Pieterse’s second argument points up the methodological advantages of focusing on capitalisms, rather than on a capitalism singular, for analyzing and highlighting the afore-mentioned distinction between two waves of and recent trends in globalization. The spotlight on urban and rural poverty is however missing, and in summing up Pieterse says that the ‘task of global emancipation is to rebalance state, market and society—the big three—and introduce social cohesion and sustainability into the growth equation. This means that each component changes: the state becomes a civic state, the market a social market, and growth turns green.’ For details. See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Globalization the next round: Sociological perspectives,” Futures, 40 (2008), 707–720.

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156. W.I. Robinson, “Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state,” Theory and Society, 30 (2001), p. 161; and “Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization, Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies,” Sociological Forum, 13 (December 1998), p.563.

157. Robinson, “Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization, Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies,” pp.563-4.

158. Photis Lysandrou, “Globalization as commodification”, Cambridge Journal of Economics 29 (2005), p. 769.

159. Grant Kien, “Culture, State, Globalization: The Articulation of Global Capitalism,” Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, 4(2004), p.477.

160. W.I Robinson, “Capitalist Globalization and the Transnationalization of the State”, Available at faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/merupert/Research/HM%20workshop/Robinson.htm and accessed on 27 October 2008. Emphases added.

161. Hirsch, op.cit., p. 268. Antunes briefly defines Fordist and Toyatism/Fleible methods of production as follows: “By “Fordism-Taylorism” I mean the system of production and its associated work process that dominated large-scale industry throughout most of the twentieth century, one rooted in mass production and resulting in a generally standardized output. It was characterized by a mixture of Fordist assembly-line production with Taylorist time-and-motion study; tasks were broken down, and a clear distinction was made between elaboration and execution. From this primitive process of work and production emerged the mass production worker, a participant in the collective manufacturing process of the great vertically integrated corporations, with their clearly defined hierarchical management. …Toyotaism is a form of organization of work that originated in the Toyota factory in post–World War II Japan and differs from Fordism basically in that (1) its output is closely tied to demand, (2) it is varied and quite heterogeneous, (3) it is based on work teams that carry out a great variety of functions, and (4) its principle is that of “just in time”—making the best possible use of production time and keeping the replacement of parts and of stock at a minimum. Whereas under Fordism the factory produced 75 percent of its own needs (vertical integration), under the Toyota system it produces only 25 percent. It has horizontal integration of the manufacturing process and transfers to subcontractors a large part of what formerly was made within the factory.” See Ricardo Antunes, “The World of Work, the Restructuring of Production, and Challenges to Trade Unionism and Social

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Struggles in Brazil”, Latin American Perspectives, 27 (November 2000), p. 24. Emphases added.

161. Ibid.

162. Robinson, “Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state,” Theory and Society, 30 (2001), p.159.

163. Ibid., p.171. The Washington Consensus, originally conceptualized by Williamson, includes the following prescription for neoliberal agenda: 1. free trade; 2. capital market liberalization; 3.flexible exchange rates; 4.market-determined interest rates; 5. the deregulation of markets; 6.the transfer of

assets from the public to the private sector; 7. the tight focus on public expenditure on well-directed social targets; 8. balanced budgets; 9. tax reform; 10. secure property rights; and 11. the protection of intellectual property rights. See David Held et al., Debating Globalization (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 8.

164 Robinson, “Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational

state,”p. 185.

165. Ibid., pp. 171-3.

166. Ibid., p. 160.

167. Bob Jessop, ‘Globalization and the National State’, Published by the Department of Sociology, Lancaster Lancaster University, p. 5. Poulantzas also argues for the persistence of ‘nation’ and its inseparable relation to the state. He says that “that national social formations are still important because they remain 'the basic sites of reproduction and uneven development ... in so far as neither the nation nor the relation between the state and nation are reducible to simple economic ties. The nation, in the full complexity of its determination -- a unity that is at the same time economic, territorial, linguistic, and one of ideology and symbolism tied to "tradition" -- retains its specific identity as far as the "national forms" of class struggle are concerned, and in this way the relation of state and nation is maintained”. See ibid., p.8.

168. Sylvia Walby,” The Myth of the Nation-State:: Theorizing Society and Polities in a Global Era,” Sociology, 37 (August 2003), p. 531.

169. Ibid.

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170. Ulf Hedetoft, “The Nation-state Meets the World: National Identities in the Context of Transnationality and Cultural Globalization”, European Journal of Social Theory, 2 (1999), p. 89.

171. Mauro Guillén, “Is Globalization Civilizing, Destructive or Feeble? A Critique of Five Key Debates in the Social Science Literature,” Annual Review of Sociology, 27 (2001), p. 254.

172. James Petras and H. Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century (London Zed Books, 2001), p.54.

173. Hirsch, op.cit., p. 269.

174. Robinson, “Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state,” Theory and Society, 30 (2001), p.166. Robinson strongly argues that the

concepts of nation and state are not coterminous and “there is nothing in the historical materialist conception of the state that necessarily ties it to territory or to nation-states” He defines the “state is the congealment of a particular and historically determined constellation of class forces and relations, and states are always embodied in sets of political institutions. Hence states are: a) a moment of class power relations; b) a set of political institutions (an apparatus"). The state is not one or the other; it is both in their unity”. See ibid., pp. 161, 163 and 165. It is to be pointed out here that not all Marxists agree with the concept of disappearance of the nation state. Lacking a concept of TNC, Wood goes on to say thus: “To say, as Marx did, that capitalists have no nation is certainly to say that they have no national loyalties and will move wherever the imperatives of profit-maximization take them, but it certainly doesn't mean that they have no roots in, or no need for, the state or for their own nation-state in particular. … Because global capitalism is nationally organized and irreducibly dependent on national states, national economies and national states can still be the primary terrain of anti-capitalist struggle.” See Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Unhappy Families: Global Capitalism in a World of Nation-States”, Monthly Review, 51(July-August 1999). In this connection it is important to note that Hirst and Thompson, while arguing for the indispensability of the of nation state as a source of the rule of law at both domestic and internal levels, come closer to a concept of global state. “In a system of governance in which international agencies and regulatory bodies are already significant and are growing in scope, nation states are crucial agencies of representation. Such a system of governance amounts to a global polity and in it the major nation states are the global electors. States ensure that, in a very mediated degree, international bodies re answerable to the world’s key publics, and that decisions backed by the major states can be enforced by international

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agencies because they will be reinforced by domestic laws and local state power.” See Paul Hirst and Grahaeme Thompson, Globalization in Question: The International Economy and the possibilities of Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 190-91.

175. Robinson, “Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state,” Theory and Society, 30 (2001), p. 167.

176. Ibid., p.168.

177. Petras and Veltmeyer, op.cit., pp. 12, 25 and 30-1.

178. Leslie Sklair, “The Transnational Capitalist Class and Global Politics: Deconstructing the Corporate–State Connection”, International Political Science Review, 23 (2002), pp. 161 and 171. Emphases added

179. Robinson, “Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state,” Theory and Society, 30 (2001), pp. 173-4.

180. Ibid., p 175.

181. Ibid., p. 188.

182. Christopher Chase-Dunn, “Globalization from Below: Toward a Collectively Rational and Democratic Global Commonwealth,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 581 (May 2002), pp.59-60.

183. Brett Bowden, “Civil Society, the State, and the Limits to Global Civil Society,” Global Society, 20, (April 2006), p. 177.

184. David Levi-Faur, “The Global Diffusion of Regulatory Capitalism”, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 598(March 2005), p.15.

185. Elmar Altvater, Globalization and the Informalization of the Urban Space (Aalborg University: DIR & Institute for History, International and Social Studies), p. 7.

186. Sven Bislev, “Globalization, State Transformation, and Public Security,” International Political Science Review, 25 (2004), p. 281.

187. Alexander Wendt, “Why a World State is Inevitable”, European Journal of International Relations, 9 (2003), p. 491.

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188. Benno Teschke, “Theorizing the Westphalian System of States: International Relations from Absolutism to Capitalism,” European Journal of International Relations, 8 (2002), pp. 37-8.

189. Hilbourne A. Watson, “Liberalism and neo-liberal capitalist globalization: Contradictions of the liberal democratic state,” GeoJournal, 60 (2004), p.49.

190. Ibid.

191. Ibid., p. 50.

192. Linda Weiss, “The state-augmenting effects of globalization,” New Political Economy, 10 (September 2005), p. 352.

193. Watson, op.cit., p.51.

194. Ibid., p. 44.

195. Ibid.,p. 45 and 50

196. Manfred B. Steger, Globalization (New Delhi: Oxford University, 2006), pp. 97-111.

197. G. Dumenil and D. Levy, “The Nature and Contradictions of Neoliberalism”, in L. Panitch and Colin Leys (eds.), Socialist Register (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi, 2002), p.55.

198. Steger, op. cit., p.112.

199. Jan A. Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (London: Macmillan, 2000), p.229.

200. Rollin F. Tusalem, “Democracies A Boon or a Bane? The Role of Civil Society in Third- and Fourth-Wave Democracies,” International Political Science Review 28(2007), pp. 379-80.

201. Bob Jessop, “Time and Space in the Globalization of Capital and Their Implications for State Power”, Rethinking Marxism, 14(Spring 2002), pp. 97-8.Emphases in original.

202. Ibid. pp. 98-9.

203. Ibid., p.195.

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204. Ibid., p105-6.

205. Ibid., p. 106.

206. Ibid., pp. 113-4.Emphases added.

207. Jessop, “Globalization and the National State”, p. 11.

208. Ibid.

209. Ibid. Eleswhere Jessop makes a very strong plea for the transformation of the Keyenesian Welfare State in the Fordist regime of accumulation into a ‘Schumpeterian workfare state’ in the post-Fordist regime of accumulation from the 1970s onward. His conceptualization is as follows: “In abstract terms, its distinctive objectives in economic and social reproduction are: to promote product, process, organizational and market innovation in open economies in order to strengthen as far as possible the structural competitiveness of the national economy by intervening on the supply side; and to subordinate social policy to the needs of labor market flexibility and/or the constraints internal competition. In this sense it marks a clear break with the Keynesian welfare state as domestic full employment is downplayed in favor of international competitiveness and redistributive welfare rights take second place to a productivist reordering of social policy. In this sense its new functions would also seem to correspond to the emerging dynamic of global capitalism … .” See Bob Jessop, “Post-Fordism and the State,” in A. Amin (ed.), Post-Fordism: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 263.

210. See Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, pp.79-81.

211. Robinson, “Social theory and globalization: The rise of a transnational state,” Theory and Society, 30 (2001), pp. 188-9.

212. Jessop, “Brining the State Back in (Yet Again): Reviews, Revisions, Rejections and Redirections”, p.15.

213. See Fukuyama, op cit.This is what he said: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” In a way, this comment means that “the debate initiated by the modernization school in 1950s and 1960s over the convergence of the development of capitalism and socialism

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appears to have come to an end.” See Sun Liping, “Development Societal Transition: New Issues in the Field of the Sociology of Development”, Modern China, 34 (2008), p. 97.

214. Hirsch, op. cit., , p. 283.

215. Erkki Berndtson, “The Party System and the Future of the State in Advanced Capitalist Countries,” International Political Science Review, 6

(1985), p. 66.

216. G. Dumenil and D. Levy, “The Nature and Contradictions of Neoliberalism”, in L. Panitch and Colin Leys (eds.), Socialist Register (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi, 2002), p. 84.

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PROFESSOR BIPUL KUMAR BHADRADEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY

JADAVPUR UNIVERSITYKOLKATA-700 032