These are some early thoughts on Leo Panitch’s work on the nature of the state, who I see as the best contemporary proponent of aspects of the work of Poulantzas and Miliband. There is further work to do on the critique of the concept of ‘relative autonomy’, but also on Panitch’s more recent work with Gindin on the international system of states (where I used Colin Barker’s work in more detail) but more on that later. I emphasise this text is in its early days, but comments and criticism are most welcome.
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Since the economic crisis of the 1970s and the era of neoliberal ‘free trade’, most mainstream analysis of the capitalist state has emphasised the role of globalisation in the state’s apparent weakening. Such analysis argues that there has been a demotion of national state power and the rise of the international. A similar position has also been taken up by some Marxists who argue nation states are disappearing with power relations reforming on transnational lines, a position exemplified by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s book Empire (2000). The implication of this shift in analysis of the state is that the role and power of international institutions are primary and that there are few, if any, possibilities to have national states mediating the worst aspects of capitalism. The analysis argues that national states are largely powerless in the face of globalisation and international competition.
Many Marxists have argued strongly against this understanding (Panitch 1994; Panitch 1999; Harman 2007), and contend that while the state has changed to some extent the belief that nation states has been usurped is incorrect. Leo Panitch (1994; 1999) is an important figure in Marxist political economy writing on aspects of capitalist development, class struggle, imperialism and economic crisis — often in collaboration with Sam Gindin (Albo et al. 2010; Panitch & Gindin 2012). Panitch’s essay ‘Globalisation and the State’ (1994) criticises the argument that the era of globalisation has seen the bypassing of the state through the rise of transnational governance, or the external political power of transnational capital. His work on theorising the capitalist state is informed by that of Nicos Poulantzas (1994, pp.66–67) and Ralph Miliband (1999, pp.25, 29–30) in particular. Panitch argues that it was only in the late 1960s and 1970s, with the emerging work of Miliband, Poulantzas and James O’Conner, that Marxist state theory moved from being a critique of established theories (such as pluralism) into a positive project that sought to develop an alternative and better model — including the development of new conceptual tools for that purpose (1999, p.20). Panitch argues that:
the new theory of the state had Marxist roots but it was founded on the notion that nothing like an elaborated and coherent theory of the capitalist state (in contrast with the complex array of concepts and tendential laws that constituted Marxian economics and historical materialism) had been fashioned either by Marx himself or by his successors — up to and including Gramsci. And the new theory was concerned to displace the narrowly ideological official Marxism of the Communist Parties (ibid).
Given the overly determinist accounts within ‘official Marxism’, this move was undeniably one to be welcomed. Panitch looked to Poulantzas regarding how the state and production are related through the conceptual framework of ‘relative autonomy’ (Panitch 1999, p.23; Callinicos 2006, p.200). He looked to Miliband in stressing that the class nature of the state was not one of an external financial or class power enacting a veto over elected governments, but rather it ‘involved long-standing and deep structural, personal and ideological linkages between the Treasury and the Federal Reserve and financial capital’ (Panitch 1999, p.25).
Panitch is concerned with the question of structure and agency in society, and sees the development of ‘the concept of relative autonomy’ as an important step forward in understanding the state (1999, p.23). He argues that the state is a both a capitalist state (serving the interests of the ruling class) at the same time as functioning with relative autonomy from the immediate social relations of accumulation. He argues there are limits on the state’s autonomy, and cites Poulantzas well-known formulation that ‘[t]he (capitalist) state, in the long run, can only correspond to the political interests of the dominant class or classes’ (cited in Panitch 1999, p.30). That is, what ‘states can autonomously of, or do in response to societal pressures, is ultimately limited by their dependence on the success of capital accumulation. It is above all in this sense that their autonomy is only relative’.
For Panitch, the question must therefore be how to explain the interdependence and relative autonomy of the state and production: ‘[t]he development of the concept of relative autonomy was precisely about providing the tools of analysis to understand the distinct limits of the state’s independence from capital’ (1999, p.23). The implication in Panitch’s framework is that the state and accumulation are two different logics tied up with each other; that they are separate but interacting sets of social relations.. Yet the question of the nature of that correlation is left unclarified. Panitch accepts that the state is constituted within capitalism as a capitalist state, but is focussed primarily on its function not its form. For example, he argues that the political source of capitalist power at the nation and international level is ‘the state’s guarantee of control of the major means of production, distribution, communication and exchange by private, inherently undemocratic banks and corporations’ (Panitch 1994, p.87). Thus he sees the state’s function is to guarantee control to the ruling class, but this does not tell us specifically why this is the case.
Yet in considering capitalism as a totality, the question of how production and the state are part of the same set of social relations comes to the fore. The question confronting Panitch is how two separate logics interact, yet the primary question, not sufficiently elaborated by either Panitch or a specifically Marxist theory of the state, is how the state and production are differentiated moments of the same totality. In this way, Clarke (1991; 1983), Barker (1978; 1991) and others argue correctly that you must start from the question of what is the mode of production and the ensemble of social relations that constitute it. In his critique of Poulantzas, Barker puts it in this way:
Workers in capitalist factories make cars, steel, chemicals, toothbrushes, etc: but in this very act of making things, they also produce surplus value. Their work activity takes a form in which they reproduce their bosses, producing the means by which their own exploitation and domination is continued. The whole social order — relationships of family, state, science, education, etc — should be understood as perpetually produced and reproduced elements made by real active individuals in their social interconnections. It is not that one section of society makes society, makes the environment, etc, while another is merely the passive, organised section. All human history is the record of activity of all the individuals who compose it.
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Within this perspective, it is the particular form that social relationships take which defines the various ‘modes of production’. In class societies, like capitalist society, the key to comprehending society is the form that the active struggle between the classes takes. In particular, the modes of action and the social relationships among the oppressed majority are crucial to comprehending how the society is maintained, and how it may be overthrown through revolutionary practice.
Now, while the analyses of Miliband and Poulantzas are not the same, it is apparent that in neither of these authors’ work is this central understanding of the class struggle, and in particular of the forms of activity of the exploited classes, present as a central and defining element. Thus there is a measurable distance between their analyses and those of Marx (Barker 1979).
This critique can be extended to the work of Panitch, whose writings on the nature of the state do not place class struggle at the centre — indeed the class struggle is strangely absent in his theoretical discussion on this question. Further, he fails to recognise that class society is created as an active process, and that therefore the state is not simply an expression of the will of the ruling class but a form of capitalist social relations in their entirety. Marx himself attended to this connection between the immediate conditions of production in any given society and the nature of the entire set of social relations that arise from them in a famous passage in the third volume of Capital:
The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers — a relationship whose particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power — in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case. This does not prevent the same economic basis — the same in its main conditions — from displaying endless variations and gradations in its appearance, as the result of innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural conditions, racial relations, historical influences acting from outside, etc., and these can only be understood by analysing these empirically given conditions (Marx 1991, pp.927–928).
Put another way, in his preparatory notebooks for Capital, later collected as the Grundrisse, Marx writes of his initial plans to write an entire section of his critique of political economy on ‘the concentration of the whole in the state’ (Marx 1973, p.227).
In separating state analysis from the commodity form and the capital relation, Panitch is unable to explain why the state takes the form it does in contemporary capitalism. His approach also fails to illuminate why states differ in their form (including amongst the economically advanced West). In this way, the concept of ‘relative autonomy’ equivocates on the specific form of the state. Further, his focus on how the state apparatus ‘authors’ change also obscures rather than clarifies. It does not tell us how and through what processes such changes come about, and it relies on the idea that the actions of the state are both relatively autonomous from accumulation and the result of bourgeois political dominance over it — he in effect merges Miliband and Poulantzas. He implies the state is capitalist because of who has political authority, and in doing so does not make clear how capitalist competition and exploitation shapes the limits of the state in a given moment. So, for example, in his discussion of the British state ‘authoring’ changes under Margaret Thatcher he implies neoliberalisation was a solution to the crisis of the 1970s that was proposed and enacted via people (politicians and members of the state apparatus) who had been intellectually convinced of such a course. He doesn’t envisage that Thatcherism (as a global phenomenon) spread because it was both an emulation of successful ‘neoliberal’ projects elsewhere, such as in the Global South, and because competitive pressures forced other national capitalisms to themselves emulate the example set by Thatcher in the UK.
Panitch (in deploying Robert Cox’s work) also sees a line of conflict within nation states, in the changing hierarchy of state departments or apparatuses. He contends that these changes are related to the internationalisation of the state:
Rather than a loss of power, the internationalisation of the state after 1945 reflected a shift in power inside the state, entailing ‘a restructuring of the hierarchy of state apparatuses’. In appearance there was ‘virtually nothing’ to signal this change in structure; rather the goals pursued and the uses to which the structures were put changed. Agencies with direct links to the ‘client groups of national economy’, such as ministries of labour and industry and institutions of tripartite corporatism that had developed in the inter-war era, were not displaced. Indeed they, and the social forces attached to them, remained ‘relatively privileged’ and even ‘preeminent’. But they were subordinated to prime ministerial and presidential offices, foreign offices, treasuries and central banks in such a way that they became ‘instruments of policy transmitted through the world-economy linked central agencies’.
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Both in Europe and in North America, ministries of labour (and the tripartite forums and agencies they sponsor) as well as ministries of welfare and education, are being restructured to conform with the principles of global competitiveness, but their capacity to retain their links to the social forces they represent in the state rests on their ability to tailor this reconstruction along the lines of ‘progressive competitiveness’ principles (1994, pp.70 & 84).
Although Panitch acknowledges in his argument that all state agencies are being remade in the era of globalisation, the emphasis in his analysis is on the differences between different parts of the state and the subordination of some (labour, welfare and education ministries) to others (cabinet, treasury, foreign affairs). On this point Panitch curiously moves towards a pluralist view of the state form — where certain parts of the apparatus are connected to, or represent, subaltern forces and how such parts have been demoted in the neoliberal era.
Contemporary work by Panitch on the state focuses on the question of globalisation and the interplay of national states and the international, in particular financial crisis and the role of the US state in establishing a global hegemony. Panitch usefully points out the two problems with the argument that globalisation is a process where capital escapes the confines of the nation state, and ‘runs free’ internationally (1994, p.63). He argues, firstly, that such an analysis overestimates the extent of national control over capital in previous periods. Moreover, the implication is that the aims and efforts of the Left have been adequate in earlier eras and simply need to be recast into the emerging international arena. Secondly, he notes that such an analysis misses that contemporary globalisation is a process of state reorganisation (as opposed to the subsumption of states) and is a process ‘authored by states’ themselves. As Panitch correctly posits it, such misunderstandings promote ‘a false dichotomy between national and international struggles and [divert] attention from the Left’s need to develop its own strategies for transforming the state, even as a means of developing an appropriate international strategy’ (ibid 63). He argues such a position misunderstands what the ‘internationalisation’ of the state really entails, that rather than a usurping of the nation in the rise of the international he argues it is as follows:
…in the context of globalisation…the nature of state intervention has changed considerably, [but] the role of the state has not necessarily been diminished. For from witnessing a by-passing of the state by a global capitalism, what we see are very active states and highly politicized sets of capitalist classes hard at work to secure what Stephen Gill…aptly termed a ‘new constitutionalism for disciplinary neoliberalism’.
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The internationalisation of the state in the 1990s appears to be taking the form, in the continuing absence of the ideological consensus or capacity to bring about a transnational regulation of capital markets, of formal interstate treaties designed to enforce legally upon future governments general adherence to the discipline of the capital market. This arises out of a growing fear on the part of both domestic and transnational capitalists, as the crisis continues, that ideology cannot continue to substitute for legal obligation in the internationalisation of the state (ibid 1994, pp.63 & 74).
The logical question arising from this is why is it hard to achieve global governance? It is not simply because a consensus on governance cannot be achieved because of ideological or cultural differences, but because there is no global ‘state’ — and the US state cannot ‘stand in’ for such a body. The US, despite its relative power to other key developed states, remain part of a competitive system of states. Panitch is right to criticise those who have argued that globalisation equals the death of the national state, but his position downplays inter-national/ inter-state competition — including how this competition plays out in non-economic forms, such as those described a century ago by Marxist theorists like Nikolai Bukharin, in his classic book, Imperialism And World Economy (Bukharin 1987). While it is correct for Panitch to argue that bi- or multi-lateral treaties are seeking to enforce legal obligations in the absence of a global state, such legal frameworks do not even guarantee the same effective — rather than simply formal or juridical — rights amongst states. Marx argued that ‘between equal rights force decides (ref)’, and we must be conscious of how that force manifests through competition — economically, politically and militarily.
Albo, G., Gindin, S. & Panitch, L., 2010. In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives, Oakland: PM Press.
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Bukharin, N., 1987. Imperialism and World Economy, London: Merlin Press.
Callinicos, A., 2006. Making sense of imperialism: a reply to Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. International Socialism Journal, 110, p.196–203.
Clarke, S., 1983. State, Class Struggle and the Reproduction of Capital. Kapitalistate, 10(11), p.113–133.
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Hardt, M. & Negri, A., 2000. Empire, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Harman, C., 2007. Theorising Neoliberalism. International Socialism. Available at: http://www.isj.org.uk/?id=399.
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Marx, K., 1973. Grundrisse, London: Penguin.
Panitch, L., 1994. Globalisation and the State. The Socialist Register, 30, p.60–93.
Panitch, L., 1999. The Impoverishment of State Theory. Socialism and Democracy, 13, p.19–35.
Panitch, L. & Gindin, S., 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism, London: Verso.
