A break between either a state with its capitals or by capitals with their state is a difficult and risky business. If a state turns on private capital, it can create a situation in which people begin to challenge not merely private capital but capital accumulation as such and, with it, the hierarchies of the state. If a private capital breaks with "its" state it risks being left to fend alone in a hostile and dangerous world.
This mutual interdependence between states and capitals has implications for an issue which many analysts never even touch on-the class character of the state bureaucracy itself. The assumption is usually either that it is simply a passive creature of a private capitalist class or that it is a separate political formation with interests quite different to those of any form of capital. Class is seen as depending on individual ownership (or non-ownership) of property, and the conclusion drawn is that the state bureaucracy cannot be an exploiting class or part of an exploiting class. This is implicit in the view of, say, Ellen Wood and David Harvey, who see state run economic activities as lying "outside" the system of capitalist production. 80
Such an approach leaves a huge hole when it comes to analysing capitalism in the century and a quarter since Marx's death. The total income of society passing through the hands of the state has reached levels much greater than income going directly to private capital as profits, interest and rent. Investment directly undertaken by the state is often more than half of total investment, 81 and the state bureaucracy directly disposes of a very big portion of the fruits of exploitation.
An analysis of class in such a situation cannot restrict itself to looking at things as they appear in the official "common sense" of a society as expressed in its juridical definitions of property. Classes, for Marx, depend not on such formal definitions, but on the real social relations of production in which people find themselves. They are aggregates of people whose relationship to material production and exploitation forces them to act together collectively against other such aggregates. In an unfinished final chapter to Volume Three of Capital Marx insists that classes cannot be identified simply by the "sources of revenues" since this would lead to an infinite division of classes, paralleling "the infinite fragmentation of interests and rank into which the division of social labour splits labourers as well as capitalists and landlords" . 82 What makes such diverse groups come together into the great classes of modern society, he argues elsewhere, is the way in which the revenues of one set of groups arise out of the exploitation of those who make up other groups. As he put it in his notebooks for Capital, "Capital and wage labour only express two factors of the same relation". 83 The capitalist is only a capitalist insofar as he embodies the selfexpansion of value, insofar as he is the personification of accumulation; workers are workers only insofar as "the objective conditions of labour" confront them as capital.
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond