The State Debate ed. Simon Clarke (Macmillan 1991).
Post-Fordism and Social Form eds. John Holloway and Werner Bonefeld (Macmillan 1991).
This immediate experience of the repressive nature of the state is a vital
touchstone against those that would urge us to elicit state power to our
advantage. Yet a simple gut reaction to the state is not enough; it is
necessary that we understand both what the state is and how its role and
function in the class war is changing. This has become vitally important in
recent years. With the rise of the New Right under the libertarian banner
of minimising the state, we are confronted with the wholesale privatisation
of state provisions. In the face of the war of all against all of the
market, state provision of welfare and the NHS etc. all too often seems the
preferable false choice. Without a clear understanding of what the state
is, and how its role and function is changing, it is all too easy to be led
into either defending in isolation a simplistic anti-state position - a
position that all too frequently ends up as seeing the state as simply an
instrument of some grand conspiracy of capital - or else abandoning an
anti-state perspective in practice and relapsing into liberal campaigns
that seek simply to lobby the state for various reforms.
It is therefore vitally important that we develop our theory and
understanding of the state. But where should we begin?
Together The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form
provide perhaps the most sophisticated Marxist theory concerning the state
that has been developed in the last two decades, and both are worth
consulting in order to come to an understanding of what the state is and
how its role and functions are changing in the present period of
capitalism.
The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form are the
first two books in a series that seeks to bring to a wider audience various
debates and discussions that have emerged within the Conference of
Socialist Economists, and its journal Capital & Class, over the
past decade. As collections of papers by leading Marxist academics that
make few concessions to the lay reader both these books appear at first
sight rather formidable, if not dry and inaccessible to the non-initiated.
However, the editorial introductions to both of these volumes go a long way
towards placing these debates in context and seek to show how the
collection of articles are not simply an irrelevant academic debate but a
debate that has profound political and practical implications. Indeed the
editors of both volumes see themselves as partisans in fierce polemic, and
they make no pretence of presenting an unbiased selection of papers. As
Simon Clarke, the editor of The State Debate, readily admits:
The papers by Colin Barker, Joachim Hirsch and Bob Jessop provide a
flavour of other sides of this debate. However, I make no apologies for the
balance of the collection, or for the partisanship of this
introduction.[1]
Clarke, and Holloway and Bonefeld, the editors of Post-Fordism and
Social Form, can be seen as on the same side in the underlying polemic
that runs through both volumes. In this polemic Clarke, Holloway and
Bonefeld side with those who seek to attack the prevailing structuralism
and technological determinism of much modern Marxist theories of the state
and the development of modern capitalism, which has led to the increasingly
popular notions of Post-Fordism and the Post-Fordist state, by an
insistence on seeing both the state and capital not as structures but as
class struggle. The implications of which Holloway and Bonefeld make quite
clear in the conclusion to their introduction to Post-Fordism and Social
Form:
There are two crucial issues in the discussion of Fordism and the
Fordist state. The first is the nature of the present crisis. Is capitalism
already on the way to overcoming the international crisis and to
establishing a relatively stable basis for a new period of prosperity, as
the post-Fordism thesis suggests, or are we still in the middle of a
prolonged and quite unresolved crisis of overaccumulation, as Clarke
suggests? The answer to this question affects dramatically how one sees the
prospects of world development and the urgency of the socialist destruction
of capitalism. It is important to remember that the last major crisis of
capitalism was resolved only through the destruction of millions of
workers.... The second issue is how one understands the driving force of
capitalist development. Given that there are major changes taking place in
the pattern of capitalist social relations at the moment, how is one to
understand these changes? As the replacement of one model by another, driven
forward by the objective tendencies of capitalist development, or as a
process taking place through constant, hard-fought struggle? If the former,
we are confronted by a new reality, a closed structural-functionalist world
which we are powerless to change, and all we can do is adapt or cry out in
despair. But if the latter, we are faced with no 'reality' other than the
reality of a constant struggle, a struggle of which we are inevitably
part.[2]
The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form
For Clarke, the debate in the 1970s arose from the inadequacies of the
traditional Marxist theories of the state that been inherited from the two
wings of classical Marxism. On the one hand the Leninist theories of state
monopoly capitalism saw the state as simply an instrument of monopoly
capitalism which had to be smashed before a socialist state could be
constructed through which the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' could then
be imposed. On the hand reformist and revisionists theories took the state
as being simply a neutral instrument that could be wielded to the advantage
of which ever class was able to assume the reins of government.
For Clarke, both the Leninist and reformist approaches to the state ran
into problems with the electoral advance of social democratic parties in
the 1960s. The theory of state monopoly capitalism was unable to account
for how it was possible for social democratic parties to take charge of the
state apparatus and hence it was unable to provide an adequate theoretical
basis to inform the politics of those socialists within such parties. At
the same time the reformist approach was unable to define the limits of
state power. It was therefore unable to explain the difficulties facing
socialist in exercising state power to the advantage of the working class.
So, for socialists attempting to advance socialist policies within the
state apparatus both the theory of state monopoly capitalism, which denied
the possibility of democratic socialism, and reformist theories, which
denied the obstacles and limits to democratic socialism, traditional
Marxist theories had ceased to be adequate. But there was a further
inadequacy which, as we shall see, for Clarke was to prove even more
important. Both these strands of traditional Marxist theory centred on the
question of seizing state power. For the largely libertarian orientation of
much of the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s such an orientation towards
state power was irrelevant. It was in response to this situation that the
first attempts were made to develop a Marxist theory of the state, which
gave rise to the great debate between Milliband and Poulantzas.
Miliband began by raising the all important question of why it was that the
state, even if it had a democratic constitution and the majority of the
population were working class, acted in the interest of the capitalist
class? Why was it that even democratic states were capitalist states?
Drawing from the empirical and commonsensical traditions of British
academia Miliband's answer to this was simple enough. The state acted in
the interest of the capitalist class: firstly because the leading positions
within the state apparatus were held by members of the bourgeoisie; and
secondly because the economic power behind capitalist lobbyists was far
greater than other interest groups. Thus although the state may be
democratic, and while it may be open and pluralistic, the economic power of
capitalists interests and the bourgeois sympathies and perceptions of those
running the state apparatus meant that the policies of the state were
dominated by the minority interests of the bourgeoisie.
Miliband's theory of the state implied that it was not sufficient for
socialist to capture office. It was necessary for any socialist Government
to be backed up by a mass extra-parliamentary movement that could counter
the political and economic pressures that would be brought to bear against
socialist policies both within and outside the state apparatus. Yet as
Clarke observes, Miliband's theory of the state:
...was unable to conceptualise the limits to the exercise of
state power on behalf of capital, except to the extent that such exercise
met with popular resistance. This laid Miliband's account open to the
charge of offering an 'instrumentalist' theory of the state, which
ultimately reduced the state to an instrument of the capitalist class, and a
'voluntarist' theory, which saw the limits to state power in the
organisation, will and determination of the contending classes.
In Britain, where even the leadership of the Labour Party was dominated by
public school and Oxbridge graduates, and the state was infused by notions
of class privilege, the ideas of Miliband may have appeared not only
sufficient but even self-evident. However, they soon became contested by
the far more sophisticated theories emanating from France which were being
put forward most forcefully by Poulantzas.
For Poulantzas it was simply not enough to say that the state apparatus was
dominated by members of the bourgeoisie. In fact there were many instances
where the state was run by classes other than the bourgeoisie, or was run
by a distinct faction of the bourgeoisie, yet they still were capitalist
states that ultimately ensured the dominance of the general interests of
capital. Indeed, the problem for Poulantzas was to explain how the state
could be capitalist without the bourgeoisie necessarily having to act as
the ruling political class.
Simply put, the answer Poulantzas offered to this problem was that the
state could only act within certain limits that were determined by the
capitalist mode of production. The state could only function if it had the
power to raise taxes and command material resources; but, so long as the
material reproduction of society was based on the capitalist mode of
production, this power ultimately depended on the success of capitalist
accumulation. If the state persistently acted against the interests of
capital then sooner or later the conditions for capital accumulation would
be undermined, the economy would be thrown into crisis and the state would
find it increasingly difficult to command the material resources it needs
to function.
So, for Poulantzas, insofar as society was structured by the capitalist
mode of production, the state was always 'determined in the last instance'
by the need to sustain capitalist accumulation. Yet within such structural
limits Poulantzas suggested there was a large degree of relative autonomy
for state policy and political action. Political conflict would necessarily
arise between various classes and factions over the determination of state
policy and this would give rise to the formation of various class alliances
and 'hegemonic blocs' between the dominant classes and factions through
which the state was run.
As Clarke points out, although both Miliband and Poulantzas went beyond the
traditional Marxist theories of the state, they were still bound by the old
socialist project of contesting state power. Such a political imperative
was increasingly divorced from the practical political struggles that were
being fought in the 1970s in which the struggle was primarily
against the state rather than for it. As Clarke himself puts it:
"This perspective was increasingly remote from the popular struggles
which were developing through the 1970s, which confronted the state more
and more directly not as the prospective instrument of their liberation,
but as the principal barrier to the realisation of their aspirations."[3]
This point became increasingly apparent to many within the CSE from their
analysis of contemporary struggles around housing and labour processes. It
was this that led Holloway, Picciotto, Clarke along with others, to attempt
to develop the theory of the state further, so as to consider not only the
capitalist content of the state but also its form: that is
to not only understand what the capitalist state must do but how
it must do it. For a theoretical starting point for such a theoretical
project, that would allow them to break from the Poulantzas and Miliband
framework, they looked to the state derivation debate that had been
developing independently in Germany.
For the German theorists any Marxist theory of the state had to begin with
the categories of Marx's Capital. For them Capital was not
simply a Marxist political economy that was counterposed as a radical
alternative to bourgeois political economy, and to which a Marxist
sociology, a Marxist political science and so forth could be simply added
in accordance with the given disciplines of bourgeois social science.
Rather Capital was a critique of political economy as such.
It sought to go beyond the analysis of the bourgeois economy to grasp
capitalist society as a totality. In doing so Marx's critique had to expose
the readily apparent objective categories of bourgeois political economy -
money, commodities, capital etc., as reified social relations that assumed
the social form of things, and which in turn gave rise to idea of political
economy or economics as a distinct 'objective social science'.
As a consequence, these German state theorists did not simply set out to
develop a Marxist theory of the state within the confines of 'political
science', as both Miliband and Poulantzas had sought to do, but rather
sought to derive the state form from the very categories of Marx's
Capital, and then, in doing so, show how the sphere of politics
manifests itself as being both distinct and separate from that of the
economy.
The implications of this approach was that the state was not presupposed as
something separate from capital, which then had in some way to be
articulated to it, as either an instrument or as a relative autonomous
structure and apparatus, but was rather a manifestation of the essential
social relations of capital that necessarily has to present itself as
something separate and distinct from capital and the 'economy'. In short,
within capitalism, we have to begin by recognising that the state is
capital!
Of all the German state theorists it was J. Hirsch who was most influential
in Britain, and it was his version of state derivation that served as the
inspirational source for the attack on the Miliband-Poulantzas orthodoxy,
that was collected together by Holloway and Picciotto in the seminal State and Capital: A Marxist Debate. However, even then, as Clarke
admits, there were vital differences between Hirsch and his British
adherents, the full significance of which only began to emerge with
Hirsch's attempts to reformulate his theory of the state in the light of
the new French regulation school in the early 1980s. It is these
differences that underpin the arguments and polemics fought out in the
articles collected together in both The State Debate and
Post-Fordism and Social Form.
As Holloway and Bonefeld make clear in their introduction to
Post-Fordism and Social Form, Hirsch had been preferred over other
German state theorists of the '70s because he went furthermost in escaping
from the 'capital logic' approach, that was prevalent within much of the
German debate, which tended to see the state form as simply a
function arising from the needs of capital for an apparently
independent social form above competitive battle of contending capitals.
Indeed Hirsch had insisted that the form of the state had to be
logically derived before any functions could be ascribed to it. As
a consequence the state form could be seen as subject to class struggle.
In so far as there were differences between Hirsch and his British
followers it was over the importance of historical analysis. Indeed, in
their introduction to State and Capital, Holloway and Picciotto
had criticised Hirsch for taking the emergence of the state form, and with
it the manifest separation of the economic from the political, as a 'once
and for all' historical act, rather than one that had to be repeatedly
reimposed through class struggle. However, at the time this difference was
seen mainly as a matter of emphasis which only implied the need to
supplement Hirsch's state theory with more historical orientated analysis.
With Hirsch's reformulation of his theory of the state in the 1980s it
became clear that this difference of emphasis between logic and history was
symptomatic of more fundamental differences that arose from Hirsch's
failure to fully break with the functionalism of the 'capital logic'
approach. In his articles reprinted in both The State Debate and
Post-Fordism and Social Form, Hirsch attempts to give his theory an
historical dimension by adopting the French regulation approach that saw
the crisis in capitalism of 1970s as a shift from a Fordist 'mode of
accumulation', involving mass production and mass consumption, to a
post-Fordist mode of accumulation of flexible specialisation etc. For the
French regulation school, this shift in 'mode of accumulation' which
centred on the process of production, demanded a wider shift in the
regulative institutions of society that ensured the overall reproduction of
capital and labour. This, for Hirsch, implied a change in state form
from a Fordist to a post-Fordist state, which he then sought to analyse.
In embracing the French regulation school so as to historicise his theory
of the state, Hirsch relapsed into structuralism. Indeed, as Holloway and
Bonefeld point out, Hirsch takes up many of the structuralist concepts of
Poulantzas. As a result, Hirsch falls into the ultimately determinist and
fashionable view of the 1980s which saw the emergence of a
post-Fordist/post-modernist era as the inevitable outcome of the
development of the objective laws of capitalism, with all the political
implications of accepting the 'new realities' of the end of the working
class and the rise of designer socialism that this implied.
In The State Debate and Post-Fordism and Social Form these
political implications are drawn out and ruthlessly criticised at a
theoretical level. As such we find several lines of attack. Firstly there
are those at the level of method through which the regulation school and
Hirsch's reformulation of state theory is attacked on the basis of its
disarticulation of class struggle and structure,[4] its underlying
technological determinism,[5] and its misreadings of Marx.[6] While secondly
there are those on a historical level which raise questions over the
precise periodisation of capitalism into pre-Fordist, Fordist and
post-Fordist modes of accumulation.[7] Through all these lines of attack, as
we have already noted, the underlying argument against the structuralist
orthodoxy is that capital is class struggle.
So what are we to make of Post-Fordism and Social Form and The
State Debate? Quite clearly we must side with the editors in their
polemic against the post-Fordist etc. With Hirsch retreating into the
comfort of his professorship, insisting that we understand everything
before we act:
...we must come to a clear understanding of the trends in social
development and of changes within capitalist formations. Only then can we
realise the relevance of movements and conflicts and the conditions for
social-revolutionary politics in today's society, and only then will we be
ready for political action.[8] Or Jessop who, in failing to fully recognise the political implications of
the regulationist theory and the reformulation of the state approach,
blithely suggest they provide a 'good framework for a research programme';
our sympathies are clearly with Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et al.
Yet if we consider the polemic more closely we can only take sides with
certain reservations. Firstly, on closer inspection, it becomes clear that
Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et al in making their polemic against the
post-Fordists, fail to critically situate themselves and their relation to
the left. Indeed, the sheer vehemence of Holloway and Bonefeld's attack on
the post-Fordism is perhaps in some sense due to their belief that
post-Fordism, and with it designer socialism, is nothing other than a
betrayal. Yet the degree to which these theoretical comrades were
originally on the side of 'real socialism' in the first place is never
adequately considered. Secondly, the insistence that capital is
class struggle, while vital in the polemic against structuralism is not
without its own problems and ambiguities.
Let us first consider our reservations concerning Clarke, Holloway,
Bonefeld et al with regard to their situation and relation to the
left. For this we should perhaps look a little closer at Clarke's
introduction to The State Debate. While this introduction seems a
reasonably comprehensive contextualisation of the debate and its origins
there are two points that are not adequately addressed and which gives us
clues to the political position of Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et
al. Firstly Clarke does not really explain why the debate over the
state became silenced in the late 1970s. He states that the debate was
primarily for 'political clarification' and alludes to the changing
political climate but does not tell us anything further. Secondly, he does
not discuss in any detail the political context that led to the
re-emergence of the debate in the 1980s nor its political significance.
In order to draw out the implications of these omissions we must seek to
place Clarke's history of debate into the wider and more explicit context
of the crisis of the New Left of the late 1970s and the failure of the left
strategies of the 1980s.
The crisis of the New Left
On the other side, in the face of the 'political and social realities of
the post '68 era' many in the New Left turned towards reviving the
organisations of the traditional left. Thus not only was there a resurgence
of Trotskyism (at least in Britain) either in revised or in traditional
forms, but also a concerted attempt to renovate the old Stalinist Communist
Parties! So rather ironically, while the New Left had originally emerged as
a reaction against the excesses of Stalin that had resulted in the invasion
of Hungary in 1950s, less than twenty years later many New Leftists
re-entered the Communist Parties so as to reform and rehabilitate them.
This resulted in the emergence of Eurocommunism which sought to distance
the Communist Parties of Western Europe from the ideological commitment to
'proletarian revolution', a commitment that had in effect served to reduce
the Western Communist Parties to being little more than a tool of USSR
foreign policy during the Cold War, in favour of a electoral strategy of
capturing state power.
For the erstwhile students of the class of '68, who had now begun their
'long march through the institutions', Leninism, whether of the Stalinist
or Trotskyist variety, offered a privileged role as leading intellectuals
planning the political strategy on behalf of the working class. As these
students of '68 became the lecturers of the 70s, Marxism became
academically respectable. But this academic Marxism was dominated by the
structural Marxism of Althusser, the arch renovator of the French Communist
Party, who saw the party intellectuals as the sole producers of scientific
truth.[9] As Althusserain Marxism swept all before it, being championed by the
vanguard of intellectual Marxists of the New Left Review, so
Poulantzas, structural Marxism's representative in the field of political
science, rose to pre-eminence.
This then is the broader context within which the Poulantzas-Miliband
debate emerged. But by the late 1970s both the two separate wings of the
New Left were in crisis. In Britain the proletarian offensive had been
successfully contained into established political and economic channels and
had as a consequence become diffused. Capital's counter-offensive had now
begun. This had become clear when the Labour Party formally abandoned
Keynesianism and embraced monetarism with James Callaghan's speech to the
Labour Party conference in 1976, and his subsequent letter of intent to the
IMF. This was followed by a programme of drastic cuts in public expenditure
and the complete abandonment of the Labour manifesto's commitments to make
an 'irreversible shift of wealth in favour of working people'.
With the rise of the New Right and the first cold breezes of monetarism,
the New Left was thrown into crisis. For the libertarian left the new
political and economic climate threatened to reduce the space for building
and experimenting with alternative structures and lifestyles, while the
increasing power of the right exposed the weakness and lack of unity of the
new social movements that were all busy 'doing their own thing'. At the
same time, both the weakening of working class militancy and the open
failure of the Labour Government, and its traditional social democratic
project, had opened the way for the growing popularity of a more virulent
right. The looming prospect of a Thatcher Government, along with the rise
of the National Front, cast doubt amongst those on the 'far left' that only
a few years earlier had been 'preparing for power' after the fall of the
Heath Government.
The impact of this crisis was to stimulate an intense bout of
self-criticism that was finally resolved in an all-embracing call for left
unity. Perhaps one of the most important examples of this reaction, and one
which Clarke, Holloway, Bonefeld et al politically connect to, was
Beyond the Fragments. Beyond the Fragments was originally a
discussion paper that brought together the various experiences of three
women who had been active in both the feminist movement and various
Trotskyist and 'far left' groups. As such it ably expressed the crisis
confronting both the feminist movement and the more 'soft' Trotskyist
groups such as the IMG that had sought to mobilise the new social movements
within a Leninist framework.
By the late 1970s the feminist movement was in deep crisis. With the
original impetus of 'consciousness raising' running out of steam, and in
the changing political and economic climate, the women's movement became
racked with tensions and divisions that had been emerging between socialist
and radical feminist. In the face of the general retreat of radical
feminists into either mysticism or separatism, socialist feminists had
become increasingly concerned that the feminist movement was becoming
little more than a middle class ghetto that was failing to address the
everyday concerns of working class women. A failing that was becoming ever
more important with the threat to women's rights posed by the rise of the
right.
Yet, at the same time, socialist feminism had found the often authoritarian
and depersonalised forms of organisation and politics of the 'traditional
male left' in stark and uncomfortable contrast to forms of organisation and
politics that had been developed within the feminist movement. What is
more, their repeated efforts to reform such organisations and to
reorientate their politics in a feminist direction had proved more than
disappointing.
It was in this context that Beyond the Fragments emerged as an
attempt to go beyond the failure of both the feminist movement and the
Leninist left. Drawing on their experiences, the contributors to this work
provided perceptive criticisms of both these movements, and implicitly the
New Left in general. Yet for all its perceptiveness in detail, Beyond
the Fragments failed to go far enough. It failed to see how the left
could act as a means to recuperate struggles, and for all its criticisms of
Democratic Centralism it failed to get beyond the idea of Party and social
democratic politics. In refusing to impose a solution to the crisis of
the New Left, in recoiling from the 'ultra leftism' of the autonomist
movements that at the time were raging in Italy, Beyond the
Fragments ended up as a vague appeal for an uncritical left unity. An
appeal for unity that eventually ended up as a rallying cry to join the
Labour Party!
Another response to the crisis of the late 1970s was the work of
London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group which became published as In and
Against the State. This group of radical academics and professionals,
of which Holloway was a leading member, sought to address the important
question facing many of the class of '68 whose professional careers were
coming into contradiction with their socialist beliefs. Indeed, the
organisation of 'radical' professions were proliferating in the late 1970s
whose pretensions were ably criticised at the time:
These 'radical' specialists (radical lawyers, radical architects,
radical philosophers, radical psychologists, radical social workers -
everything but radical people) attempt to use their expertise
to de-mystify expertise. The contradiction was best spelled out by a
Case Con [an organisation of 'radical' social workers]
'revolutionary' social worker, who cynically declared at a public meeting,
"the difference between us and a straight social worker is that we
know we're oppressing our clients". Case Con is the spirit of
a spiritless situation, the sigh of the oppressed oppressor; it's the
'socialist' conscience of the guilt ridden social worker, ensuring that
vaguely conscious social workers remain in their job, whilst feeling
they are rejecting their role...The academic counter-specialists attempt to
attack (purely bourgeois) ideology at the point of production: the
university. Unwilling to attack the institution, the academic milieu, the
very concept of education as a separate activity from which ideas of
separate power arise, they remain trapped in the fragmented categories they
attempt to criticise. Non-sectarianism is the excuse for their
incoherence...[10] Using the concept of state form as their theoretical basis, Holloway
and others sought to show how it was possible for 'radical' professionals,
by identifying themselves as state workers, to contest the forms of state
provisions so that the class struggle could be waged in as well as
against the state.[11] Whatever we may say against it, this work did raise
important questions with regard to the need to go beyond simply defending
state provision of welfare that was the common response of the left to the
rise of monetarist policies, so as to challenge the form of state provision
that had long served to demobilise the working class. Indeed, In and
Against the State proved far more perceptive than Beyond the
Fragments in its warnings over the dangers of using the Labour Party to
seize local Government and was well aware of 'state workers' substituting
themselves for their clients in the struggle in and against the state:
When the crunch comes, when Whitehall's commissioners move in to deal
with over-spending, will people in these areas unite to protect the
councils that defend 'their' services? We hope so, but we fear not.[12]
Yet for all this, In and Against the State, with its resolute
'non-sectarianism', ended up simply appealing for the left to take these
concerns on board. It failed to see how the social democratic project of
'building socialism' was a necessary part of the state-form and its
demobilising of the working class. As a result it too ended up in the
movement for an critical left unity which subsequently underlay the mass
stampede into the Labour Party.
The left's strategy in the 1980s
The capture of the GLC allowed the co-existence of various tendencies
within a broad 'right on' left populism. Erstwhile eurocommunists could
practice implementing an alternative economic strategies for an economy
which was, after all, 'bigger than that of many Third World countries'. The
neo-Gramscian proponents of establishing a cultural hegemony of the left
could revel in the numerous festivals put on by the GLC, while the various
new social movements found official recognition in the appointment of
various committees and officials.
Yet you did not have to be a reader of Class War to know that the
GLC was one big gravy train for trendy middle class professionals. The
appointment of numerous highly paid professionals to look after special
interest groups such as blacks, gays women etc. did little to 'empower' the
class. Indeed, they often worked against the class by dividing people into
special interest groups. In Lambeth the lefty council did not hesitate to
evict squatters so that it could build a housing advice centre so that
social workers could have a place to advise the homeless!
The politics of the GLC was often more to do with image than anything else.
A point borne out not only by the insistence of renaming everything in
'right on terms', so that for instance professionals became known 'workers'
(thus lawyers became 'legal workers' while accountants became 'finance
workers' and so forth) but also in its gesture politics. Ken Livingstone's
incessant need to maintain his reputation culminated in the London
Transport fiasco when, after the law courts over-ruled the GLC's cheap
fares policy, Red Ken threatened to defy the law only to back down at the
last minute, in the end managing to pose for the cameras buying his ticket
showing he wasn't such a 'red' after all!.
Clarke significantly avoids dealing with the left in the 1980s. While he
declares his aversion to the dangers of a left populism, he is far from
being unsympathetic to the politics of 'harnessing the resources of the
local state' and concludes that while such strategies failed they should
not be considered misguided. For as he says 'history judges the losers
harshly'. This failure to criticise the politics of the GLC means that
Clarke's introduction fails to draw out the full significance of the
State Debate as part of a response to the immediate aftermath the
defeat of this left strategy of the early 1980s.
For the rats fleeing the sinking ship of the left, the leap from the image
politics of the GLC to the designer socialism of Marxism Today and
its associated fads of post-modernism, post-Fordism post everything, was
after all not that great. Indeed, it was the 'socialist planners' of the
GLC that hailed post-Fordism as the way forward to regenerate London's
economy, drawing as their model the Communist Party controlled
municipalities of the 'Third Italy'. It is only by understanding the debate
over the state and post-Fordism etc. as part of a wider polemic against
what is perhaps seen as a betrayal, or at least a pessimistic turn, of
erstwhile 'comrades' that we can appreciate much of the underlying
vehemence that we find in many of the articles in both these volumes. And
it is perhaps only through such an understanding that we appreciate the
full political significance of this 'debate'.
This brings us to the second part of our reservations towards Clarke,
Holloway, Bonefeld et at. The political ambiguities that we have
outlined above are reflected in at the abstract theoretical level. While a
comprehensive analysis of this beyond the scope of this review we should
perhaps note a few salient points.
In Post-Fordism and Social Form we find Holloway and Bonefeld's
repeated insistence against Jessop that capital is class struggle!
Indeed this insistence is perhaps vital for them if they are to press home
their polemic against what they see as the structuralist orthodoxy of much
of Marxist theory. Yet while we must be sympathetic to this stress on class
struggle we should perhaps retain certain reservations. Thus when they
claim the backing of Marx by returning to Capital to derive the
centrality of class struggle to Marx's own analysis then we must concur
with Jessop when he indicates that the categories of Capital are
very far from being explicitly imbued with class struggle. Indeed, we
would argue that in 'Capital' Marx necessarily takes as his starting point
the critical perspective of the bourgeoisie. A perspective through which
class struggle is only implicit, or at the most marginal to the development
of the exposition. As a result what strikes the reader who is aquatinted
with the importance of the question of class struggle for Marx is its
apparent absence in the pages of Capital.
To understand what capitalism is, Marx was obliged to begin his
critique from this critical perspective of the bourgeoisie. But from this
perspective capitalism does appear as simply the autonomous movement
of structures; capital developing in accordance with its own objective an
inexorable laws. To make class struggle explicit we have to go beyond these
categories. We have to invert them. The failure to do so can only generate
problems particularly when we seek to return to Marx to derive our theory
as form-analysis seeks to do.
Thus for example when Marx shows how labour takes the social form of value
he presupposes the defeat and subsumption of the worker. Indeed, as
self-expanding value, capital is the presupposition of the repeated
subsumption of living labour; it is the triumph of dead alienated labour
over the living. Capital is class struggle only in that it is not class
struggle; that is in so far as it is the provisional defeat of the working
class. A similar argument could be advanced for the state formas
a defeat of the autonomous organisation of the working class.
It would be unfair to say that Holloway and Bonefeld etc. are completely
unaware of this. Yet we may suggest that their failure to fully recognise
this point leads them into certain ambiguities in order to preserve the
value of their role within the state. Thus, for example, Holloway makes a
distinction between state-form and the state apparatus which,
as Clarke has pointed out, seems to imply that: "...the bourgeois
state apparatus can somehow be given a socialist form."[13]
So what then are to make of The State Debate and Post-Fordism and
Social Form? Both Post-Fordism and Social Formand The State
Debate provide a important analysis of the nature of the state and the
current period of capitalism. An analysis that is for the most part
directed against the prevalent structuralist and objectivist Marxist
orthodoxy. As such we are sympathetic to them but with certain
reservations. For us the struggle is not to 'build socialism' or to
democratise capitalism, it is for communism. A project that demands
no complicity with the recuperative strategies of the left and social
democracy.
School, the police, social workers, the DSS, prisons....the proletarian
rebel knows full well that the state is her enemy!
For Clarke, the selection of papers he presents in The State Debate
represent a re-emergence of a debate that originally began in the early
1970s and culminated in State and Capital: A Marxist Debate in
1978. Indeed, The State Debate could be seen as sequel to this
earlier work. As a consequence, Clarke in his introduction sets out by
tracing the development of this debate of the 1970s and placing it within
its wider political and historical context.
In the wake of the proletarian offensive of the late 1960s and early '70s
the New Left broke into two parts. On the one side there were, what have
since become known as the new social movements; feminism, ecology,
squatting, gay liberation, black liberation etc. All these movements,
whether 'oppositional' or 'alternative', combined a utopian vision for the
transformation of society, preserving the communist hopes of the heights of
the proletarian offensive, with practical everyday activity on the personal
level. As a consequence these movements adopted a distinctly anti-state
ideology and as such came to constitute what became known at the time as
the libertarian left.
It was this left unity, that preceded the influx of much of the New Left
into the Labour Party at the end of the 1970s, which brought an end to the
original debate over the state. Within the broad church of the Labour Party
all the former divisions were dissolved in the common project of
'democratising' and capturing the Labour Party for the left and seizing
control of local government as a stepping stone towards winning the next
election. This not only culminated in the near victory of Tony Benn in the
deputy leader elections in 1982, and the changes in the Labour Party
constitution, but also, and more importantly, with the fall of the GLC into
hands of the left.
[1] 'Introduction' to The State Debate, p. 1.
[2] 'Introduction' to Post-Fordism and Social Form, p. 6.
[3] 'Introduction' to The State Debate, p. 31.
[4] For example, see 'The Reformulation of State Theory' by W. Bonefeld in Post-Fordism and Social Form.
[5] See for example 'Learning to Bow' by E. Palaez and J. Holloway in Post-Fordism and Social Form which argues that technological determinism inverts the optimism of traditional vulgar Marxism, which sees the breakdown of capitalism as inevitable due to the technological inevitability of the rising organic composition of capital, to a pessimistic technological determinism that sees the future dominance of capitalism as inevitable.
[6] See 'The Great Bear: Post-Fordism and Class Struggle: A Comment on Bonefeld and Jessop' by Holloway, in Post-Fordism and Social Form.
[7] For example, see 'Overaccumulation, Class Struggle and the Regulation Approach' by Clarke also in Post-Fordism and Social Form.
[8] 'The Fordist Security State and New Social Movements' in The State Debate, p. 156.
[9] Simon Clarke has long been an arch-critic of Althusserianism; see for example, One-Dimensional Marxism.
[10] Refuse, BM Combustion 1978. It should be noted that Holloway, Gunn and Bonefeld have attempted to go beyond the academic milieu through their involvement in Common Sense. With Common Sense they originally sought to escape the stifling confines of academia by opening up the pages to everyone, but this has simply led them to reproduce their non-sectarian incoherence in a more popular form. Now, perhaps in recognition of the limitations of this particular incoherence, they have reverted to a more academic form by subsuming Common Sense as the Journal of the Edinburgh Conference of Socialist Economists.
[11] Thus they would advocate for example social workers helping their clients to get round repressive regulations and so forth.
[12] In and Against the State, 2nd edition, (London-Edinburgh Weekend Return Group 1980), p. 137.
[13] 'Introduction' to The State Debate, p. 65.