Capital, Crisis and the State

Abstract

As capitalism has moved into a period of open crisis and reconstruction, the necessity has increasingly been forced upon the working class movement to sharpen our understanding of the dynamic of capitalist accumulation and its relation to class struggle. One crucial aspect of this is the question of the relationship between capital and the state, since the state plays a vital part in the maintenance and reproduction of capital as a relation of class domination. Under the influence of reformism, revisionism and dogmatism, which for a number of reasons dominated Marxist thought from the 1930s to the 1960s, the analysis of the processes of capitalist accumulation became separated from that of class struggle and the state. The analysis of capital accumulation came to be thought of as ‘economics’ in a narrow sense, reified into the investigation of the relations between ‘things’, instead of between ‘social processes appearing in a thing-like shell’ ( Rosdolsky, 1974, p. 66). The contradictions of accumulation have too often been thought of as ‘economic laws’ operating from the outside upon political class relations. The state has been thought of as ‘the state in capitalist society’, rather than as being itself one aspect of the social relations of capital, and therefore stamped throughout, in all its institutions, procedures and ideology, with the contradictions of capital. Hence, there has been a constant undertow towards a reformist conception of revolution as being aimed essentially at the seizure of the existing state apparatus.