--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: "9781608461042" library_document_id: "4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe" source_sha256: "46dee6b4497d88f0c925457d635dd321964c6f4b00bbc137e1d31adde30698c7" pdf_physical_page_count: 426 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 110 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe?start=110&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=110&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=100&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=120&limit=10" --- # Zombie Capitalism Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=110 | PRINTED_PAGE=110 which it has grown up. The state and the individual capitals are intertwined, with each feeding off the other. Neither the state nor the particular capitals can easily escape this structural interdependence. The particular capitals find it easier to operate within one state rather than another, because they may have to profoundly restructure both their internal organisation and their relations with other capitals if they move their operations. The state has to adjust to the needs of particular capitals because it depends on them for the resources-particularly the revenues from taxation-it needs to keep going: if it goes against their interests, they can move their liquid assets abroad. The pressures which different states apply on each other are indispensable for the capitals based within each to ensure that their interests are taken into account when they are operating globally. The existence of rival states is not something produced from outside capitalism nor is it optional for capitalists. It is integral to the system and to its dynamic. Failure to grasp this, as, say, Nigel Harris does, leaves a great hole in any attempt to understand capitalism over the last century. The "autonomy" of the state and the class nature of its bureaucracy The mutual dependence of states and capitals does not, however, mean that states can simply be reduced to the economic entities that operate within them. Those who do the actual running of the state take on functions which competition between firms prevents firms themselves undertaking. They have to mediate between rival capitals, providing judicial systems and overseeing, through central banks, the financial system and the national currency. As Claus Offe put it, "Since 'capital as a whole' exists only in the ideal sense . . .it requires special guidance and supervision by a fully differentiated political-administrative system" .76 The state also has to provide mechanisms for integrating the mass of people into the system: on the one hand the coercive institutions that beat people into submission (police, secret police, prisons); on the other hand the integrative mechanisms that divert grievance into channels compatible with the system (parliamentary structures, frameworks for collective bargaining, reformist, conservative or fascist parties). The proportions in which these two sets of mechanisms operate vary from situation to situation, but everywhere they exist to complement each other. The coercive mechanisms persuade people to take the easier path of integration into the system; the integrative mechanisms provide the velvet glove which conceals the iron hand of state coercive power, so legitimising it. The Italian revolutionary Marxist Antonio Gramsci rightly used Machiavelli's metaphor of the "centaur", half animal, half human, to capture the way in which force and consent are combined in the state.77 110 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=111 | PRINTED_PAGE=111 The coercive and the integrative mechanisms depend on organisation and leadership from outside the sphere of capitalist exploitation and accumulation as such-from military and police specialists on the one hand, from political leaders able to mobilise some degree of social support on the other. An effective state requires the building of coalitions that obtain the support-or at least the compliance-of such elements while allowing them a certain leeway to pursue their own interests.78 It then, inevitably, reflects not just the interests of capital in general, but the concessions it makes to integrate other social groups and classes into its rule. It necessarily displays an important degree of autonomy. Marx commented in 1871 that "the complicated state machinery . . . with its ubiquitous and complicated military, bureaucratic, clerical and judiciary organs, encoils the living society like a boa constrictor . . . " The state bureaucracy arises to assure the domination of the existing ruling class, but in the process becomes a "parasite" which is capable of "humbling under its sway even the interests of the ruling classes . . . "79 This autonomy reaches its highest points when governmental power lies with reformist, populist or fascist parties with a powerful base among workers, peasants or the petty bourgeoisie. There are cases when those who exercise such autonomy are able to break with and even expropriate important capitalist interests within their territory. This was to be true on numerous occasions in the course of the 20th century-German Nazism, Argentine Peronism, Nasserism in Egypt, Ba'athism in Syria and Iraq, are all examples. There are also innumerable cases in which individual capitals behave in ways detrimental to the interests of "their" state-moving funds and investment abroad, doing deals with foreign capitalists that undercut other local capitals, even selling weapons to states fighting their own. Yet there are limits to the extent to which a state can break free from its capitals, and capitals from their state. A state may override the interests of particular capitalists; it cannot forget that its own revenues and its own ability to defend itself against other states depend on the continuation of capital accumulation. Conversely, the individual capital can, with considerable difficulty, uproot itself from one national state terrain and plant itself in another; but it cannot operate for any length of time in a "Wild West" situation with no effective state to protect it both against those forces below which might disrupt its normal rhythms of exploitation and against other capitals and their states. Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State 111 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=112 | PRINTED_PAGE=112 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. 112 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=113 | PRINTED_PAGE=113 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 113 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=114 | PRINTED_PAGE=114 In this sense, state revenues are comparable to the other revenues that accrue to different sections of capital-to the rents accruing to landowners, the interest going to money capital, the returns from trade going to commodity capital and the profits of productive capital. Just as there is continual conflict between the different sections of capital over the sizes of these different revenues, so there is continual conflict between the state bureaucracy and the rest of the capitalist class over the size of its cut from the total surplus value. The state bureaucracy will, on occasions, use its own special position, with its monopoly of armed force, to make gains for itself at the expense of others. In response to this, the other sections of capital will use their own special positionindustrial capital its ability to postpone investment, money capital its ability to move overseas-to fight back. Yet in all this, the different sections of capital cannot escape their mutual interdependence more than temporarily. It eventually asserts itself in the most dramatic fashion, through crises-the sudden collapse of the system of credit, the sudden inability to sell commodities, sudden balance of payment crises or even the threat of state bankruptcy. Those who direct the bureaucracies of the state may not own individual chunks of capital, but they are forced to behave as agents of capital accumulation, to become, according to Marx's definition, part of the capitalist class. Marx points out in Capital that with the advance of capitalist production there takes place a division of function within the capitalist class. The owners of capital tend to play a less direct part in the actual organisation of production and exploitation, leaving this to highly paid managers. But, insofar as these managers continue to be agents of capital accumulation, they remain capitalists. Hilferding developed the argument further, pointing to the divisions within a single capitalist class between the mass of rentier capitalists, who rely on a more or less fixed rate of return on their shares, and "promoter" capitalists who gain extra surplus value by gathering together the capital needed by the giant corporations.84 We can add a further distinction, between those who manage the accumulation of individual capitals and those who, through the state, seek to promote the development of the sibling capitals operating within an individual state-what may be called "political capitalists" . 114 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=115 | PRINTED_PAGE=115 State capitalism and state capitalists One of the most significant developments of the 20th century was the emergence of big state-owned economic sectors. The state came to plan the whole of internal production in Germany in the latter part of the First World War, in the US and Britain as well as Germany throughout most of the Second World Warand, of course, in the USSR from Stalin to Gorbachev and in China under Mao. Just as many analysts accept the "common sense" view that the state is something outside of capitalism, so they also refuse to accept that state-run industries and economies can be capitalist.85 The classical Marxists, however, saw things rather differently. Marx in Volume Two of Capital was already "including" among "the sum of individual capitals", " . . . the state capital, so far as governments employ productive wage labour in mines, railways etc, perform the function of industrial capitalists". 86 Engels spelt this out much more fully in reacting to Bismarck's nationalisation of the German railway system: The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more it actually becomes the national capitalist, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage workers-proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. 87 Kautsky could argue in the 1890s that the original economic liberalism (from which present day neoliberalism gets its name) of the "Manchester school" "no longer influences the capitalist class" because "economic and political development urged the necessity of the extension of the functions of the state", forcing it "to take into its own hands more and more functions or industries" .88 Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State 115 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=116 | PRINTED_PAGE=116 Trotsky could write a quarter of a century later, in The Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World: The statisation of economic life, against which the capitalist liberalism used to protest so much, has become an accomplished fact . . . It is impossible to return not only to free competition but even to the domination of trusts, syndicates and other economic octopuses. Today the one and only issue is: Who shall hereforth be the bearer of statised production-the imperialist state or the victorious proletariat. 89 What all of them recognised was that state rather than private ownership of the means of production did not alter the fundamental relations of production or the dynamic of capitalist accumulation. For the state, the purpose of nationalised industry was to enable domestic accumulation to match that undertaken by foreign rivals so as to be able to survive successfully in economic and/or military competition. To this end, the labour employed remained wage labour, and the attempt was made to hold its remuneration down to the minimal level required to sustain and reproduce labour power. The state might plan production within the enterprises it owned, but its planning was subordinated to external competition, just as the planning within any privately owned firm was. The self-expansion of capital remained the goal, and this meant that the law of value operated and made itself felt on the internal operations of the enterprises. In behaving like this, state appointees behave as much like capitalists-as living embodiments of capital accumulation at the expense of workers-as do private entrepreneurs or shareholders. It was a failure to recognise this that led Hilferding in the 1 920s to come to the conclusion that "organised" capitalism was overcoming the contradictions analysed by Marx. By the late 1 930s state planning in Nazi Germany led him to conclude that what existed was no longer capitalism at all, but a new form of class society, in which "organisation" had superseded "capitalism", and where the driving force had ceased to be profit making to feed the competitive accumulation of rival capitals. What Hilferding failed to grasp-as do all those today who still identify capitalism with the private ownership of firms competing in free markets-is that the system remained based on competitive accumulation between different capitals, even if these 116 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=117 | PRINTED_PAGE=117 were now military state capitalisms. It was driven forward by the same dynamic and subject to the same contradictions analysed by Marx. This was true during the period of total war, in which the rival states did not trade directly with each other and naval blockades greatly limited their competition in foreign markets. Every success in accumulating military hardware by a state forced efforts to accumulate similar levels of military hardware in its rivals. Just as the efforts of rival car producers to outsell each other bring the concrete forms of labour in different car plants into an unplanned inter-relationship with each other, transforming them into different amounts of a homogenous abstract labour, so too the efforts of rival tank-producing states to outshoot one another have the same result. Marx described how under the market capitalism of his time: the labour of the individual asserts itself as a part of the labour of society only by the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly through them, between the producers.90 In the world system as it developed after Marx's death, military competition came to play the same role in bringing individual acts of labour performed in diferent, apparently closed, state entities, into a relationship with each other. Acquisition of the means of destruction on the necessary scale to assure success in war depended upon the same drive to accumulate means of production as did the struggle for markets-and with that went the holding down of wages to the cost of reproduction of labour power, the forcing up of productivity to the level prevailing on a world scale, and the drive to use the surplus for accumulation. As Tony Clif pointed out more than 60 years ago, the only difference, in this respect, between military and economic competition was the form the accumulation took-whether it was terms of an accumulation of use values that could be used to produce new goods or of use values that could be used to wage war. In either case the importance of these use values to those controlling them was determined by comparison with use values elsewhere in the system, a comparison which transmuted them into exchange values. This also meant the rate of profit continued to play a central role. It no longer determined the distribution of investment between different sectors of the internal economy. The requirements Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State 117 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=118 | PRINTED_PAGE=118 of the military did this. But it operated as a constraint on the economy as a whole. If the ratio of total national surplus value to total investment in the military-industrial machine fell, this weakened the ability of the national state capitalism to sustain itself in warfare with its rivals. The decline in the rate of profit could not lead to economic slump, since the war machine would go on growing as long as there was any remaining mass of surplus value to be used up, however small. But it could contribute to military defeat. The same capitalist logic could be seen as operating in the states where new bureaucracies emerged to take control of the means of production (the USSR from the late 1920s onwards,91 Eastern Europe and China after World War Two, various former colonial states in the late 1950s and 1960s). Although they called themselves "socialist" their economic dynamic was dependent on their inter-relations with the wider capitalist world. If they traded with the capitalist countries beyond their borders, they were drawn into the logic of commodity production-and the requirement to remain competitive in markets by undertaking accumulation in an essentially capitalist way. But even if they tried to adopt an autarchic policy of cutting themselves off economically, they could not avoid having to defend themselves against predatory foreign imperialisms. In either case, they were subject to the logic of capitalism as a world system in the 20th century in the way Bukharin had described in the early 1920s. And those who ruled these societies were as much "personifications" of accumulation as were the private capitalists of Marx's time, driven into historic opposition to the wage labourers who toiled on the means of production. They were, in other words, members of a capitalist class, even if it was a class which collectively rather than individually carried through exploitation and accumulation. The state seemed, on the face of it, a great island of planningat one time even half a continent of planning-within a world of market relations. But so long as states competed to expand the forces of production within them more rapidly than each other, the planning was, like the islands of planning within the individual capitalist enterprise of Marx's time, simply planning to keep labour productivity abreast with the labour productivity prevailing on a world scale. The law of value imposed itself through such competition on all the units in the world system. Those running whole states, particular state sectors or individual enterprises were alike subject to pressure to reduce the price paid for every exertion of labour power to its value within the system as whole. 118 Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=119 | PRINTED_PAGE=119 The individual capitalist managers and individual state managers could rely for a time on the sheer size of the resources at their disposal to try to ignore these pressures. But they could not do so indefinitely. At some point they had to face hard choices if they were not to risk collapse: they could try to impose the law of value on those who laboured for them through what could be a painful and hazardous process of internal restructuring; or they could take desperate gambles in order to try to shift the global balance of forces in their favour. For the civilian corporation this might mean pouring resources into one last, possibly fraudulent, marketing ploy; for those running the state, to try to use its military force to compensate for its economic weakness. Hence the way in which the real history of capitalism in the 20th century was very different to the picture of peaceful and honest competition presented in economic textbooks-and accepted by some Marxists who have not understood the need to look at the real social relations which lie beneath surface appearances. Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State 119 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/4a3d22bd-c5b9-47a4-a022-bd35d44d9bfe.md?start=120&limit=10)