Since the directing layer in the state bureaucracy is compelled to act as an agent of capital accumulation, whether it likes it or not, it comes to identify its own interests as national capitalist interests in opposition to both foreign capital and the working class. Just as the individual capitalist can choose to enter one line of business rather than another, but cannot avoid the compulsion to exploit and accumulate in whatever line he goes into, so the state bureaucracy can move in one direction or another, but cannot ignore the needs of national capital accumulation without risking its own longer term future. Its "autonomy" consists in a limited degree of freedom as to how it enforces the needs of national capital accumulation, not in any choice as to whether to enforce these or not.
The dependence of the state bureaucracy on capitalist exploitation is often concealed by the way in which it raises its revenues-by taxation of incomes and expenditure, by government borrowing or by "printing money" . All of these activities seem, on the surface, to be quite different from capitalist exploitation at the point of production. The state therefore seems like an independent entity which can raise the resources it needs by levying funds from any class in society. But this semblance of independence disappears when the state's activities are seen in a wider context. State revenues are raised by taxing individuals. But individuals will attempt to recoup their loss of purchasing power by struggles at the point of production-the capitalists by trying to enforce a higher rate of exploitation, the workers by attempting to get wage increases. The balance of class forces determines the leeway which exists for the state to increase its revenues. These are part of the total social surplus value-part of the total amount by which the value of workers' output exceeds the cost of reproducing their labour power.
Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State
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