The concept
of ‘statality’ means that a particular form of social relation requires the
intervention of an overriding social force, a State, which either through
violence or authority possesses the power to establish or regulate that social
relation at the social level. The reason why Marx did not recognize the
statality of capitalism , or the necessity of capitalist social relations of
production to be enabled by a specific “state-form”, is that he saw capitalism
as the historical-materialist evolutionary product of “civil society”, (burgerliche
Gesellschaft) - that is to say, of a set of natural material relations of
production independent of the will of human individuals. For Marx, civil
society constituted a state of nature For Marx, civil society constituted a
state of nature (status naturae) or economic base for which the
political state (societas politica) was a purely ideological or “superstructural”
appurtenance that under certain conditions would “wither away” or be
jettisoned.
Of course, the
capitalist state-form is implicit in Marx’s entire analysis of capitalist
social relations of production, as we shall demonstrate presently; but he
failed to recognize this paramount aspect of his social theory in large part
because of the peculiar historical circumstances in which he developed this
theory. Marx had to avoid prosecution, escape persecution, and evade
imprisonment in continental Europe at the hands of highly repressive autocratic
states, the Prussian and the French, that were violently busy crushing endemic
revolutions in the period between 1789 and 1848. And to do so, he was forced to
flee to England where the liberal and democratic state allowed him a freedom of
movement and expression unimaginable on the continent. It is quite understandable,
then, why in his political theory Marx came to associate the repressive power
of the State with economies like those of continental Europe where capitalism
was only in its infancy and severely underdeveloped, whereas advanced
capitalist economies such as those of Britain and America enjoyed very liberal
parliamentary regimes in which the State, far from being violent and repressive,
was a “night-watchman state” (in the Lassallean simile) which either hid away
or even did wholly without the explicit use of physical violence. In other
words, because of his personal experience, Marx came quite reasonably to
associate the political State with the less advanced stages of capitalism and
to extrapolate its gradual withering away as capitalist industry advanced and
progressed. (I owe these insights to Mario Tronti, Preface to Sull’Autonomia
del Politico.)
What we are
arguing here is that Marx’s failure to develop an adequate political theory
stems from his insistence on assigning a scientific status to his critique of
political economy through the quantification of the notion of “socially
necessary labour time” as the centrepiece of his labour theory of value. It was
the presumed quantifiability of labour values that induced Marx to believe that
capitalism could operate by means of impersonal market forces entirely
independent of political factors. Quite clearly, such a scientistic approach
ran entirely counter to the intrinsically and incontrovertibly political
character of his critique of capitalism and of the theoretical categories he
developed for its analysis. Yet it is equally undeniable that in some respects
his analysis, especially in Das Kapital as distinct from the Grundrisse,
can lead to the conclusion that the capitalist system is inherently unstable
without resorting to political antagonism. This is true particularly of the Marxian
“law of the tendential fall of the rate of profit” expounded in Volume Three of
Capital according to which the capitalist development of the forces of
production in the systemic search for profits leads inevitably to the
suppression of the necessary labour portion of the labour day until it reaches
the zero bound. This gradual suppression must result in the fall of the rate of
profit as the portion of constant capital (equipment and materials) overwhelms
the portion of variable capital (wages). Here the eventual decline of
capitalism can be attributed to purely “automatic” quantitative factors
independently of more political or sociological elements. (For a superb review
of these matters, see P. Sylos-Labini, “The Problem of Economic Growth in Marx
and Schumpeter” where, according to the author, Schumpeter emerges as the more
“political” theoretician of the two!)
Let us
examine now in detail how the capitalist State-form arises from the Marxian categories
of analysis of capitalism. We saw earlier that capitalism can be theorized as
the coercive, violent “exchange” of living labour for dead labour or as the
reduction of concrete (experiential) labour to abstract (measured) labour by
capitalist employers (Arbeit-geber or labour-givers) on working
employees (Arbeit-nehmer or labour-takers) who are formally legally “free”
to accept the exchange. Here immediately we notice two salient matters: one is
that “formally legally free” means that workers have been separated or torn
apart from all social and economic bonds with one another and with the rest of
society, from their means of production and from self-sustaining property, so
that in the absence of the “offer of abstract labour” from the capitalist they
would be “free as a bird” (Vogel-frei, was Marx’s expression). Essentially,
this implies that workers have been expropriated from all social and economic
bonds and sustenance so that their only source of livelihood is their living
labour. And the second matter is that the living activity of workers now
assumes a double character (Doppelcharakter) in the hands of
capitalists: - a “use value” because the living labour of workers is what
allows the capitalist to be a capitalist by accumulating social wealth in the
form of exchange values produced by workers; and an “exchange value” because
the capitalist can treat the living activity of workers as “abstract labour”, as
“labour-power”, as a commodity or good like any other to which a market value
can be assigned inferior to the value of the goods produced by the
worker. Here is how Engels valiantly summarizes what was perhaps Marx’s
greatest discovery, namely, that of the Doppelcharakter of living labour
in capitalism:
What the economists had considered as the cost of production of
"labour" was really the cost of production, not of
"labour," but of the living labourer himself. And what this labourer
sold to the capitalist was not his labour. "So soon. as his labour really
begins," says Marx, .. it ceases to belong to him, and therefore can no
longer be sold by him." At the most, he could sell his future labour,
i.e., assume the obligation of executing a certain piece of work in a certain
time. But in this way he does not sell labour (which would first have to be performed),
but for a stipulated payment he places his labour-power at the disposal of the
capitalist for a certain time (in case of
time-wages), or for the performance of a certain task (in case of piece-wages).
He hires out or sells his labour-power. But this labour-power has grown up with
his person and is inseparable from it. Its cost of production therefore
coincides with his own cost of production; what the economists called the cost
of production of labour is really the cost of production of the labourer, and
therewith of his labour-power. And thus we can also go back from the cost of
production of labour-power to the value of labour-power, and determine the quantity
of social labour [m.e.] that is required for the production of a
labour-power of a given quality, as Marx has done in the chapter on the
"The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power." (Introduction to K. Marx, Wage-Labour
and Capital)
There is a difference
in market value therefore between the “embodied labour” in goods and the
“commanded labour” for which the capitalist pays the worker with wages. This “difference
in market value” is where the capitalist derives a profit and is afforded to
the capitalist because the use value of living labour is precisely to ensure
that the embodied labour of the final product is superior to the commanded
labour purchased by the capitalist. The essential point where we diverge from
Marx-Engels here is that this “inferior value” of commanded labour to embodied
labour cannot be measured as “the quantity of social labour” because the
“difference” is not quantitative because it is not quantifiable but is instead
qualitative because it is political in that it bestows upon the capitalist, the
owner of embodied labour in goods, the ability to command “future living
labour” by exchanging these goods with fresh living labour. If by
“value” we mean a practical political power to command living labour through
its “exchange” for dead labour, then the Marx-Engels definition of labour-power
is correct; if instead we mean an objectively measurable quantity, then we are
falling into error.
Therefore,
- this is a point of cardinal importance – not only is labour-power not
measurable in any other way than in a political sense, in terms of the ability
of less of capitalists being able to persuade workers that the “exchange” of
their living labour with dead labour is legitimate; but also, as a result and
as a consequence, the products of living labour, objectified or dead labour,
cannot be homologated or compared, their “values” or “embodied labour” cannot
be homogenized except politically because neither the living labour nor the
labour-power that went into their production are measurable or quantifiable
except politically! This means that the only homologation and homogenization or
“pricing” of the “value” of living labour and labour-power and products or
goods that is at all possible must take place through a series of political and
institutional steps and measures that ensure (a) the reproduction of the
society of capital, and (b) the reproduction of capitalist social relations of
production (the wage relation).
Furthermore,
there is a third salient matter: in reducing the living labour of workers to
abstract labour, the capitalist also reduces the sociality of their living
labour – the fact that the co-operation implied by social labour is very
different from the segmentation of work into individual “labours” – the
capitalist arrogates for himself the sociality of living labour, its
ineluctably and indispensably “co-operative” nature. This is why we should
never speak of “the social division of labour”, as if social labour
consisted of the sum of individual labours, but we should use instead the very
different phrase “the division of social labour”, because human
co-operative living activity cannot be “measured” or “quantified” in any
objective manner aside from political evaluations and choices – and above all
because social labour cannot be partitioned into separate individual “labours”
or labour-power that belongs to isolated individuals!
Hence, it
ought to be evident by now where the need for a capitalist “State-form” is
utterly essential to the very existence of capitalist social relations of
production right from the outset of our theoretical analysis of capitalism. The
indispensable requirement of a State-form of capital or for the statality of
capitalism arises from the following conceptual and historical pre-requisites
for the existence and subsistence of capitalism itself:
First, the
creation of a proletariat (employed workers plus reserve army of unemployed)
through the expropriation of a part of the working population existing before
the formation of capitalism such that this proletariat is formally legally
free, free from all prior status and property bonds and from legal ownership of
their means of production. This “formal freedom” ensures that the proletariat
has only its living labour to survive so that the capitalist may offer them
employment in the form of “labour-power”, of wage labour.
Second, the
social labour of workers must be presented to them as the sum of individual “labours”
that can be measured or priced (but only politically in reality) individually
as wages. Again, this is a form of expropriation of the proletariat for which
the capitalist does not “pay”.
Third, a
political and institutional pricing system or “markets” must be put in place
whereby individual capitalists are able to produce goods that allow them to
employ more workers at the end of production, either from new “markets” or else
from the reserve army of the unemployed.
It is quite
obvious that each of these conditions for the formation and reproduction of the
wage relation in capitalism require the existence of a “State-form” compatible with
and adequate to their reproduction.
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