Social Constitution and Critical Economy

Abstract

In Chapter 9, Andreas Bieler and Adam Morton charge so-called ‘Open Marxism’ with state centrism. This is a strange charge. Usually Marxism is associated with a critique of the state, and not with an affirmative political theory (cf. Bonefeld, 2003). In fact, state-centrism is generally levelled against neo-Gramscian accounts (cf. Clarke, 1991b). In this perspective, it was not only the state that was national in the past but also capitalist ‘accumulation’, ‘capitals’ (big national companies), the economic process was ‘nationally controlled’, and the phase before globalization was the ‘nation-state phase of capitalism’ (W.I. Robinson, 2004, pp. 75, 102, 107, 42). This focus on the state as the structurally determinant force is now said to be inappropriate because the new capitalist epoch is defined by the ‘global economy as the structurally determinant’ force (ibid., p. 10). However, even here the state remains central. The national state continues to govern over the labour force (Hirsch, 1997; Robinson, 2004) and it is the only organization capable of providing the cultural, political and social conditions that capital, however global, requires for its reproduction. As Robinson (2004, p. 87) argues ‘there must be some agency whose task is to produce these conditions or to regulate capital’s access to them. This institution is the capitalist state’.