with other states and their complexes of capital. And particular state apparatuses can lose a lot of cohesion as their parts try to cope with the demands of different, competing capitals. The global agenda, the regional agenda, the national agenda and, in the cases of the larger states, the sub-national agenda (of particular localised geographical complexes of capital) clash with each other, producing frictions-on occasions deep schisms-within the national political-economic structure. This was what occurred during the very long crisis inside Britain's traditional ruling class party, the Tories, through the 1990s and early 2000s: its feuds reflected a clash between those who saw British capitalism's future as tied to the US and those who saw it as dependent on integration into Europe (a clash which itself reflected British capitalism's position having the majority of its trade with Europe, but half its overseas investment in the US).
Those who see the national states as archaic hangovers from the past often speak of the emergence of an "international capitalist class" which will have as its correlate an "international capitalist state" .46 They fail to take seriously Marx's point that once "it is no longer a question of sharing profits, but of sharing losses . . . practical brotherhood of the capitalist class . . . transforms itself into a fight of hostile brothers", the outcome of which is "decided by power and craftiness".47 And when it comes to the use of power, the national state is an instrument ready to hand. Interstate conflict, to a lesser or greater degree, is an inevitable outcome once economic competition becomes a matter of life and death for giant corporations. This is just as true today as in the time of Lenin and Bukharin, even if the interconnectedness of national, regional and global circuits of capital accumulation impacts on how the instrument is used.
Such applications of pressure by states on other states still requires the deployment of large "bodies of armed men", backed up by prodigious expenditure on military hardware-alongside such "non-violent" methods as economic aid, trade embargoes, offers of privileged trading relationships and crude bribery. Much of the time the role can be passive rather than active. The force that sustains a certain level of influence does not need to be used so long as no one dares to challenge it-as with the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine between the USSR and the US which prevented either moving into the other's European spheres of influence during the Cold War. Again force can play an indirect rather than a direct role as with the implicit US threat to the West European powers and Japan not to help them militarily during the Cold War years unless they acceded to US objectives. But the violence of the state remained a vital background factor in such cases. In this lies the continuity with the imperialism analysed by Lenin and Bukharin. Even today the rulers of Russia, China, India, Pakistan and North Korea-and for that matter Britain, France and the US-see possession of nuclear weapons as the ultimate defence against enemies.
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The New Age of Global Instability