Endnotes

Prolegomena on the ‘system of states’

by Raffaele Sciortino, Robert Ferro

Introduction

It is generally acknowledged that Karl Marx envisaged a volume dedicated to the state in the plan of Capital — a volume of which he did not even write a draft. After Marx, several scholars have insisted on the incompleteness of Marxian theory in this respect, and while none has set him- or herself the explicit task of completing Marx's original project on the state, some have nevertheless attempted to partially fill this gap. Diverging from the prevailing opinion, this text suggests that the state as such does not present particular obstacles to Marxist theory, and that the Marxist conceptual array is sufficient to carry out its exhaustive analysis. The theoretical articulation from which matters become trickier lies in the path from the abstract to the concrete, which in Marx's opus, coincides with the transition from the concept of capital in general to the multiplicity of competing individual capitals. Following the Marxian method, we aim to sketch out the transition from the capitalist state in general – a notion adequate only at the highest level of abstraction – to a plurality of states which unfold and relate to each other in a system of states. In our view, such a system, as the true political counterpart of the capitalist mode of production in its actual existence, must be analyzed as part of a totality: the world market. We recognize the indispensable activity of organizing the world market as its fundamental logic. The theoretical and political implications are vast and largely unexplored by Marxist research. Such a framework is intended to allow a better understanding of the world market as a 'produced' space, strongly structured and never preexisting its institutional formalization; simultaneously, it is to be understood as a contribution to rework the issues of strategy and power on a new basis, with respect to the perspective of the overcoming of capitalist relations which appear nowadays to lurch from crisis to war.

 

The Question

In this article, our starting point consists of three basic assumptions that will be taken for granted in the remainder of the discussion. The first is that capitalism, or the capitalist mode of production (CMP) in Marx's terminology, represents the predominant mode of production in modern and contemporary history, and that this predominance has only become deeper over time. The second is that the predominant political architecture that goes along with the development of the CMP on a global scale presents itself in the form of a 'system of states'1 emerging from the planetary generalization of the modern (national or multi-national) state. The third is that this precise form of state, which differs from its pre-modern and pre-capitalist forms, is to be considered as qualitatively superior to international and supranational institutions, which are, in our view, outgrowths of individual states or arenas of cooperation and confrontation between states, and all the more so with respect to local or regional institutions, which are necessarily subordinate components of these states (unless they become states themselves due to separatist movements).

In the field of international relations (IR) or geopolitics, the existence of such a system of states (or inter-state system) does not seem to have hitherto aroused the need for a preliminary logical-philosophical elucidation: assumed as a given, it is at best linked to the anthropological diversity of human aggregations (families, tribes, nations, etc.). Some authors of the realist current, such as John J. Mearsheimer, insist in particular on the radical impossibility for these aggregations to reach a definitive agreement on “first principles” and on “what constitutes the good life”2. These authors also rightly recognize the highly competitive nature of the inter-state system, but even this basic attribute does not seem to require a stringent explanation, except to resort to extremely general considerations on human nature or the structural uncertainty of inter-state relations. As we shall see, the problem lies, in our view, in the methodological separation between the state and the economic sphere. Unfortunately, in the field of IR, this separation is contested mostly by non-realist currents (e.g. the theory of economic interdependence) and mostly to challenge the competitive character of the inter-state system itself.

In the Marxist view, the conflictual nature of this system appears to be linked to the economic competition, at varied scope and scale, involving enterprises, i.e. portions of capital that live or perish according to their ability to generate profits. The implicit or explicit assumption here is that economic competition between enterprises and branches of the capitalist economy is transferred, in one way or another, to domestic politics (i.e. political competition among political parties, or party fractions within one-party regimes) as well as to foreign policy. While the competitive character of the inter-state system is therefore understood by Marxists as a consequence of the competitive character of economic relationships, the raison d'être of the inter-state system itself, i.e. of an articulated whole made of a plurality of interacting states, gets linked to two opposite explanations: the first one considers this plurality as a sort of vestige of the conditions in which the emergence of the CMP took place historically from pre-capitalist societies. This view, which can be found for instance in Robert Brenner's writings3, considers that the formation of a single global super-state, however unlikely, would be more congruent with the CMP. The second position, on the contrary, considers the plurality of state entities as an adequate feature of the CMP in its concrete existence, by intuition of a strong, necessary link between the economic level (the many competing capitals) and the political level (the many states), without however being able to satisfactorily explicate this link. The theoretical divergence outlined here can be described as the opposition between an historicism eventually effective on the ground of empirical research, but conceptually weak, and a structuralism that fails precisely on its privileged field, the logical-conceptual one, to the extent that it proves to be incapable of deducing the inter-state system from the more abstract categories of CMP analysis. Our aim in this article is clearly not foreign to the concerns of the second approach we just mentioned. Nevertheless, our method differs from the latter in that it does not proceed from the separation of theory and history, but rather seeks to integrate the latter with the former, following the path of Marx himself in Capital4, where the arrangement of concepts and the relations they entertain with each other result “neither [from] a purely logical sequence, nor are they organized merely in accordance with the facts of history”5.

Given the magnitude of the issue and the limitations of space, we will not present a review of the literature on Marxist theories of the state, or a summary of Marxist debates on the state, but will confine ourselves almost exclusively to the Marxian opus in order to isolate the cornerstones of any Marxist theory of the state. At a later stage, we will assess its limits for the purpose of elaborating a theory of the inter-state system, and move on to the inventory of Marxian materials and notions likely to be mobilized in this direction. For the reasons already mentioned, we will make a rather parsimonious use of quotations, while providing readers with all the bibliographical references to judge the soundness of our theses and reserving further development for the future.

Outlines of a Marxist Theory of the State

It is generally known that Marx did not manage to write the volume or section on the state foreseen in the (repeatedly revised) plan of Capital. However, the state is far from absent in his theoretical framework. In addition to the countless remarks and observations on the subject which are disseminated in his early or more historical-political works, the state is also present – sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly – in his opus magnum and in its drafts or preliminary works6. Indeed it can be argued, following Tran-Hai-Hac7, that the concept of the CMP necessarily implies that of the state, and that the elucidation of the political aspect (i.e. linked to the state, precisely) inherent to the concepts of labour-power, money and capitalist land rent, is a central component of the Marxian critical project as a critique of political economy, therefore radically dissimilar to any critical political economy. In more general terms, unlike neoclassical economics, for which the supposed tendency towards equilibrium aims precisely to deny any need for non-private intervention, the Marxian position is characterized by its denial of any spontaneous propensity for harmony inherent to the CMP8. The real tendency – says Marx – evolve towards a disequilibrium which derives, in all of its forms of manifestation, from the dual character of capitalist economy. Capitalism is, at the same time, an interweaving of production and circulation of value (or, in more empirical terms, a price system) and a material process, the course of which – even under optimal conditions from the point of view of value relations – is always exposed to the risk of disorganization. Even if the CMP does not permanently trigger crises and recessions, the relations between capitalists and workers or the mutual relations between enterprises or sectors, are potentially bearers of perturbations often lacking of any endogenous stabilizing effect. Given this state of congenital instability, the expanded reproduction of the CMP is never a foregone conclusion, and presupposes at every moment the guidance function of the state with respect to private capital.

This immediate inscription of the state within the sphere of economic activity contradicts the usual representations, inherited from classical political economy, of a state whose 'intervention' in the economic field – opportune or not, desirable or not – would in any case be carried out 'from the outside'. In the Marxian view, the specificity of the state lies in the ability to escape the mechanisms of formation and modification of the average rate of profit or, to put it more simply, to create, within the very field of economic forces, a sphere of activity sheltered from competition and thus from the criterion of profitability in the strict sense. This is not to locate the state outside the field of economic agents. The imperatives of reproduction of given economic relations within a mode of production that has no natural tendency towards equilibrium require the existence of such a sphere, as well as its effective expansion as the historical process unfolds. The multidirectional, and potentially all-encompassing, character of the state's activity in the economic sphere requires a relative autonomy from the particular and short-term interests typical of private economic actors. The reason for this can only be clarified by emphasizing the decisive nature of what is at stake: the perpetuation of society in well-defined arrangements, i.e. the effective countering of the self-destructive drives inscribed in its functioning on the basis of capitalist social relations. At a superficial level, this statement could be seen as contradictory with respect to the class nature of the state typical of Marxism, but it is not. What must be brought into play here is the fragmentation of the capitalist class, which shares, in its entirety, only a single common interest, of a very general nature, in the maintaining/deepening of the process of surplus-value extraction. In order to exist in an effective fashion as the dominant pole of society, its unity must exist as a constricting force distinct from the entrepreneurial environment sensu stricto, and capable, if necessary, of imposing itself on all particular actors, who are always liable to pursue their own interests even at the expense of the viability of the existing relations of production. This being said, let us take a brief look at the main forms and modes in which state activity appears in the Marxian magnum opus.

Conditions of the sale and purchase of labour-power

According to the theory of Capital, capitalist social relations involve three economic categories: capital, wage labour and landed property. The relationship between wage-labour and capital is the most fundamental within the triangle, since it creates the economic substance that is shared between the three categories (i.e. value). The first moment of this relationship consists in the sale and purchase of labour-power, when workers and capitalists set the terms of the exchange between labour and capital according to the current state of power relations. The state plays a fundamental role in the commodification of labour-power, both from the standpoint of its appearance and early development, and of the continuity of the process on an expanded scale. In several writings, Marx and Engels have pointed out that in pre-capitalist societies, since antiquity, the state, and the army in particular, have harbored the first forms of wage labour9. At the dawn of modernity, when the appearance of wage labour begins to spread to the private economy of urban centers, state action to consolidate and extend it to the countryside, which still concentrates the bulk of the economic process, is decisive. To achieve this, it is necessary to undertake the separation of the workers from the means of production, both in terms of ownership and possession. This takes place through coercive measures introduced by the state: enclosures, expropriation of independent peasants, news laws against customary law (on wood gathering, poaching, etc.), against vagrancy, etc. Chapter XXIV of Volume I of Capital, dedicated to the “so-called primitive accumulation”10, provides the exemplification for England, where capital formation is endogenous. The last chapter of Volume I, “The Modern Theory of Colonization”11, describes the expropriation of immediate producers in areas where capital formation is not endogenous. Marx writes that “the rising bourgeoisie needs the power of the state”12 and defines the means it employs as “direct acts of violence”13, “extra-economic”14 to some extent, although “force is […] itself an economic power”15 (our emphasis). To the same extent that the state creates the conditions of the relationship between wage labour and capital, it also establishes capitalist land ownership, since this also presupposes the separation of the worker from the means of production, in contrast to feudal land ownership, which granted possession of the land to the serf and indeed chained one to the other16.

Still, as Marx writes, “it is not enough that the conditions of labour are concentrated at one pole of society in the shape of capital, while at the other pole are grouped masses of men who have nothing to sell but their labour-power. Nor is it enough that they are compelled to sell themselves voluntarily”17. Even after conferring an irreversible character and a certain critical size to the relationship between wage labour and capital, its continuity requires the state to still and always ensure the daily encounter between the sellers and buyers of labour-power, possibly under conditions beneficial to the latter. With the development of capitalist production, the continuity of the exchange between labour and capital occurs more and more 'naturally', by virtue of the prevailing economic conditions and their objective force. Nevertheless, “direct extra-economic force is still of course used”, even if “only in exceptional cases”18.

Conditions of the consumption of labour-power

In the Marxian conception, industrial profit is but one of the metamorphosed forms of surplus-value. The others are interest and land rent. But for the distribution of surplus-value to take place, remunerating also social actors not directly involved in the sphere of production, the production of surplus-value is needed. It takes place in two fundamental modalities: the production of absolute surplus-value, based on the increase of working hours, and the production of relative surplus-value, based on increased productivity through investment in machinery.

Inevitably, these two modalities of surplus-value production are also two different ways of approaching the definition of the socially accepted 'normal' working day. The state participates in this definition, which includes the regulation of the working day, i.e. of its legal limits, either by accompanying the tendencies at work within firms or by opposing them. The problem of the regulation of the working day appears in Volume I of Capital, in particular in Chapter VIII, “The Working Day”, § 5-619, and in Chapter XV, “Machinery and Large-scale Industry”, § 920. In these passages Marx shows how the state initially promotes absolute surplus-value through legislation, in combination with the processes of expropriation already mentioned, in order to root the disposition to wage-labour in the social fabric. At a later stage, the development of a new technical basis for the labour process – in this case, the transition from manufacturing to large-scale industry – makes unprecedented productivity gains theoretically possible, now unrelated to the lengthening of the working day. Despite this, there is no automatic transition from absolute surplus-value to relative surplus-value. To bring it about, two conditions are necessary: workers' resistance and legislation to limit the working day. In bringing in such legislation, the state certainly acts unwillingly, under the pressure of social protest. But it also acts in the interests of reproduction in the long term, insofar as it promotes a less exhausting and destructive use of labour-power.

State industries

Up to this point we have commented on relatively well-known passages from Marx's Capital, Vol. I. Less well known is that Volume II also considers cases in which the state directly assumes the role of the capitalist, i.e. the role of owner of means of production and of manager of the labour process. Marx makes clear that such an involvement in the immediate production process does not necessarily undermine the capitalist nature of the economic activities thus taken up by the state, since “social capital is equal to the sum of the individual capitals (including stock-joint capital and also state capital, in so far as governments employ productive wage-labour in mines, railways, etc., and function as industrial capitalists)”21 (our emphasis). There are, however, sections of social production that are absolutely indispensable to private capital as a whole, but are poorly matched to the imperative of profitability because of their physical characteristics. It is notably the case of those material infrastructures sometimes described as 'natural monopolies'. The investments for their construction generally implies an extremely long turnover time. In brief, turnover time is the time needed by a given capital to return to its initial form after having gone through all the stages of its cycle (M-C-M'). In this regard, Marx contemplates the eventuality whereby “enterprises that require a long working period, and thus a large capital outlay for a longer time, particularly if they can be conducted only on a large scale, are often not pursued capitalistically at all. Roads, canals, etc., for example were built at the cost of the municipality or state […]”22. In the two cases just mentioned – state industries destined for profitability on one side, state industries bound to non-profitable managing on the other – the passage of the enterprise under state control extracts it from market competition, hence from the equalization of the rate of profit. If this enterprise is characterized by weak profitability, as is often the case in practice, this leads to an increase in the average rate of profit within the private sector.

Conditions for the circulation of value

Contrary to widespread opinion, the monetary theory of Capital does not advocate a 'neutral' conception of money, considered as a mere intermediary for exchange transactions that would otherwise take place by barter. The idea of money as the universal equivalent implies that money is sought as such, because of its specific use-value – that is, the capacity to exchange against any other commodity, here and now or later in time, and not just to serve as a mere intermediary for acquiring a particular commodity. Moreover, the commodity-money split, which poses one commodity as the universal equivalent of all others, separates the same commodity from all others. Therefore, while in Marx's view the genesis of money is clearly an endogenous process of economic relations, and not a political act, the monopoly inherent to the function of universal equivalent implicitly requires the power of the state as its promoter and guarantor23. Thus Capital's monetary theory is neither a purely 'metallist' theory of commodity-money, nor a (pre-Keynesian or Keynesian-like) theory of fiat money. It incorporates and overcomes both.

In Volume II of Capital, Marx makes clear that “we take money to be metal money, excluding symbolic money, mere tokens of value which are specific to particular countries, as well as credit money, which we have not yet developed. Firstly, this is the course taken by history: credit money played no role, or at least not a significant one, on the early period of capitalist production”24. Although his historical argument is debatable, metallic money has for Marx the advantage of summarizing the concept of money in general, i.e. concentrating all the functions he assigns to it. Metallic money can serve all at once as a means of circulation (of payment), as a measure of value and as a store of value because precious metals are produced on the basis of the socially necessary labour-time mechanism. Still, the Marxian notion of commodity-money is based on non-metallist assumptions, since it can not be identified with the metal of which it is materially composed. Gold or silver are not metallic money as such: to become such, it is necessary for the national mint to turn them into coins. And insofar as the state adopts metallic money, it establishes its legal tender and the terms of its convertibility into paper money. Hence it is not without reason that Marx writes, in a passage from the Urtext, that “the absolute monarchy, itself already a product of the development of bourgeois wealth to a level incompatible with the old feudal relations, is – in accordance with the uniform general power which it must be able to exercise at every point of the periphery – in need of a material instrument of that power: the universal equivalent […]”25. Therefore the absolute monarchy “is actively engaged in converting money into the universal means of payment”26. If included in Capital, this passage would have avoided quite a few misunderstandings.

From the State in General to the System of States

In the previous part, we have seen the main manners under which the state presents itself throughout the exposition of Capital. We have left out some of them, undoubtedly important, but which do not specify (or specify to a lesser extent) the state as capitalist state: the state as tax collector, the state as landowner, the state as debtor27 and some others. Let us also recall that what we have summarized here is not a particular version of the Marxist theory of the state, but only the outlines of such a theory. Any variant of the Marxist theory of the state, insofar as it shares all or part of these outlines, presents a series of problems when it has to come to terms with the expansive and immediately international dimension of the CMP. We will quickly summarize them, before discussing how they could be addressed.

Problems of a Marxist theory of the state

As suggested at the beginning of this article, the capitalist state does not exist otherwise than as a plurality of states. Yet, in the account given so far, the identity between the space of the market and the territory of the state, both conceived as sole and overlapping, was implicitly assumed. Not only actual history, but Marx's own theory contradicts this identity, posing the tendency towards the formation of a world market, whose degree of integration goes beyond the mere juxtaposition of so-called national markets: “The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself”28. Hence, the discrepancy between the market, by definition driven by a universalizing thrust, and the state, destined (even when politically expansionist) to remain a piece of a larger mosaic, is fully present in Capital29, but is not investigated as such by Marx.

In our Outlines, we have highlighted a twofold link between the one and the many: on one side, between the many commodities and money (socially validated by the state); on the other, between the many capitals and the state itself. The former can be seen as an aspect or a consequence of the latter. In both cases, however, this nexus allows to grasp a specific hierarchy among economic agents. The state is not in itself the principal or predominant actor in this framework, but is the most powerful in that it is always able to orient private agents, even through retraction or laissez-faire. However, such an understanding of the internal structuring and hierarchy of the economic field does not escape what Claudia Von Braunmühl has called “the traditional point of view that sees the state as determined in the first instance by internal processes to which external determinants are, as it were, appended a posteriori”30. Indeed, Von Braunmühl and her interlocutors in the Weltmarkt-Debatte of the 1970s in Germany made a great contribution towards a more comprehensive vision, but they sometimes relapsed into a mere inversion of the viewpoint they criticized, hypostasizing the world market as a static fact (and not as a tendency which is by definition always in progress, à la Marx) or a sort of axiom. As Von Braunmühl treats the “bourgeois nation-state” as a “particularization” of the world market, defined as a sphere of capital circulation31, she implicitly carries out the deduction of the state exclusively from the inter-capitalist relation (i.e. between the many capitals), and is forced to reintroduce a posteriori the relation between labour and capital. Yet, the real capitalist social relation is simultaneously the inter-capitalist relation and the relation between capital and labour. But where to start in order to conceptualize the state? Following Marx's methodological suggestions regarding the path from the abstract to the concrete, it is clear that the state must be derived in the first place from the relation between capital and labour, while the many states and the world market can only be deduced in a further step32. This in no way means that the latter, and the inter-capitalist relationship of which they are an expression, are less socially relevant. As long as the CMP reproduces itself normally, even despite major shocks, recessions, etc., the mutual relationship of the many capitals inevitably prevails. Nevertheless, the heart of Marx's analysis lies in unveiling the conditio sine qua non (the extraction of surplus-value) and emphasizing its historically determined and strategically critical character. At this level of abstraction, the state can appear as the state in general, as the “organization of bourgeois society in the form of the state”33, since it does not relate to external factors. But as soon as the concept of capital is specified by gradually introducing all its internal differentiations, the state in general becomes the state in the singular, necessarily taking place within a network of relations that greatly transcends it. Following Von Braunmühl's intuition, we identify this network as the world market. Thus, we will try to unfold its concept in all its breadth and depth, grasping the state as part of a system of states (or inter-state system) and bringing out the latter as a moment of internal differentiation (or 'self-reflection', à la Hegel) of the world market itself.

The Many States and the World Market

The notion of the world market is not to be understood as the summation of narrower, national or macro-regional markets. At the same time, its existence as a totality superior to the sum of its parts does not produce a supreme instance that restores to these parts their interrelation in the form of an 'external' constraining force. In other words, the world market is an immanent totality, and not a transcendent one. This is what is grasped by realist scholars in IR when they claim that the inter-state system is anarchic, meaning that it lacks a pre-established hierarchy among its parts (i.e. states). Unfortunately, the methodological distinction between the state and the economic sphere generally prevents them from pushing this powerful intuition to its ultimate consequences. If states, and the inter-state system, are inscribed within the broader framework of the world market, anarchy becomes an attribute of the whole, i.e. of the world market itself. As a consequence, no pre-established hierarchy among the agents of different nature – public and private – which takes part in it can be taken for granted. As we shall see later, this is not to deny that the world market is highly structured and internally differentiated. Nor is it to dispute the greater effectiveness of the (inter-)state level over other levels and instances; but it does mean that this primacy of states is a result that needs to be constantly reproduced, and whose reproduction – precisely – is never guaranteed. Behind the relatively sustainable functioning of competitive anarchy on a world scale, one must always grasp, in the background, the continuous production of surplus-value, which remains able to irrigate all sorts of ramifications – including those located furthest away from what Marx calls “the hidden abode of production”34 – only as long as it functions correctly. Hence, the primacy of states among the players of the world market is not a divine law, but the relentlessly renewed product of a social process.

Why do states compete? Each of them embodies a certain economic subset consisting of a heterogeneous spectrum of private interests which straddle the boundary between domestic and foriegn. Domestic capitals flow out, while foreign capitals flow in. States are the floodgates which regulate theses movements. On the strictly 'internal' side, states provide, at the very least, a regulatory framing to the collision of private interests. Such a framing, applied to competitive economic relations, necessarily favors some and damages others, while trying to preserve the reproduction of the whole. The degree of penetration of foreign capital can greatly modify the form of the framing, which is always – in the context of the world market – an arbitrage between domestic and foreign interests. On the inter-state level, each state is called upon to prove, day after day, its ability to take into account private interests projected abroad by giving them a concentrated and organized form; which also means demonstrating, day after day, that such a concentrated and organized expression is preferable to the immediate, purely private expression by each individual capital separately. The latter experiences its own narrowness every time it clashes against an economic interest of the opposite sense, and of equal weight, but backed by 'its own' state.

Within the world market, the economic subsets embodied by states are not 'national economies' in the traditional sense (such as measured by national accounting: GDP, trade balance, etc.), since every national perimeter contains a combination of national and foreign economic forces (see below, Free Trade and Protectionism). Hence, these subsets do not form the world market by juxtaposing one another, but by interpenetrating unequally. Some of them largely exceed their supposed 'national economies', while others are far smaller than that. Classical analyses of unequal development and 'underdevelopment' variously put this fact on the table, without necessarily making it explicit (see below, Development Disparities and the International Division of Labour). In the most contradictory manner, the dominant economic subsets move to call into question the political-administrative geography drawn by the borders of states, without ever being able to actually overcome those. This contradictory movement summarize the world market as tendency, that is, as a law that prevails throughout its own incompleteness.

In the inter-state system, there is no hierarchy and regulatory framework independent of the practice of the agents themselves, i.e. independent of the whole of relationships (multilateral, bilateral, unilateral) of collaboration and competition, of attraction and repulsion, that states form among themselves. This is not to say that the hierarchy and regulatory framework are absolutely absent, but they emerge as provisional configurations, as momentary crystallizations of power relations among economic subsets, expressed in a concentrated form through relations between states. The movements of capitals generate friction, shocks, expansive thrusts that are not always compatible with each other, inevitably leading to repercussions on the field of inter-state relations. Whether the whole of these relations is capable of: a) maintaining itself in the form of a system, i.e. preserving the predominance of the state-form itself over the entire globe; b) providing a relative order – is once again a result and never a foregone conclusion. This notably requires the fulfillment of a specific ordering function, which can only be assumed by a part of the system, namely a state. But which one? Only the “commanding power of the world market”35, i.e. the state associated with the dominant economic subset on a global scale (Great Britain in Marx's time, the United States from 1945 up to now), due to its economic and political-military strength, can impose a (provisional) regulatory framework on the inter-state system and fulfill the ordering function for some time. Periods of 'multipolar' competition over the role of the commanding power of the world market open up with major economic crises, signaling the insufficiency of surplus-value in relation to over-accumulated capital, and get closed by creating the conditions for the revitalization of surplus-value production – possibly through war. 

Anarchy and Organization

As anticipated, the activity of organizing the world market is exercised over an entity highly prone to disorder, and states – including the commanding power of the world market – participate in it as partial actors, lacking mastery over the totality. States relate to the totality only indirectly, mediately, insofar as they manage to give concentrated and organized form to the interests of the economic subsets they embody. But the cohesion of the whole does not exclude conflict between its parts, and states are called upon to express them. This is mostly done peacefully, but the use of armed force and especially its threat are always around the corner. In short, conflictuality is an ineluctable aspect of inter-state relations. The Marxian analytical framework can offer a better understanding of the content and causes of a substantial portion of these conflicts.

The circuits of competition

The world market is not an 'abstract space'36. It is a deep, irregular, highly stratified space. It consists of a combination of transnational, national and sub-national (regional) markets. These three layers have always existed, although under different forms. On the first, large enterprises of specific branches compete on perimeters that transcend, sometimes greatly, the borders of states. On the second, large and small enterprises compete within a perimeter that mostly coincides with the territory of a state. On the third, generally small firms compete over limited spaces, coinciding with a fraction of state territory. To bring into focus how these circuits combine, let us briefly recapitulate Marx's theory of competition contained in Capital, Volume III, Section 2, Chap. IX and X37. Contrary to usual representations of it as a generic 'war of all against all', Marx shows precisely that competition is structured predominantly by small market segments. These segments, which Marx calls 'branches', are much narrower than what commentators on economic affairs call 'sectors' (for instance: IT, automotive, pharmaceuticals): the basis of a branch may be a single product or even a small part, and the production of the same product, but of different quality, may correspond to several branches. A company may be located in a large number of branches, and a 'branch' summarize an enormous number of them. The essential point is that only those enterprises that are dedicated to the production of the same product of comparable quality on the same market qualify as direct competitors. Only because of this very concrete and stringent form of competition, an average regulatory price and thus an average rate of profit emerge in each branch of social production. The success or failure of each competitor depends on the ability to comply with the regulatory price by generating a profit equal to or greater than the average profit of its branch. In this framework, generalized competition is a mere tendency that, to be fully realized, would require a condition not given in everyday reality, i.e. perfect mobility of capital across the countless branches of production, so that it can move unceasingly towards the most profitable branches and thus leading to the emergence of a single average rate of profit for all branches.

The picture of competition becomes even more fragmented when we introduce the geographical determinants (not explicit in Marx's analysis) from which we have started in this part, i.e. the character of the market area. The three aforementioned strata (sub-national, national and transnational) are not watertight compartments: firstly, because the enterprises distributed over the three layers are, at least to some extent, each a buyer for the other; secondly, because the growth of a given capital may lead it to expand its market area from the sub-national to the national level, and from this to the transnational one. An important part of the states' activity lies in supervising and accompanying these processes, in particular at the crossroads between the national and transnational space, either by acting in favor of the opening of new disposal areas through free trade agreements, or conversely by erecting barriers to protect existing areas. This brings us to the next point.

Free Trade and Protectionism

Marx is sometimes appreciated by liberal economists as a defender of free trade against protectionism, which his Speech on Free Trade38 seemingly confirms. While it is true that Marx endorsed the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, he never meant to celebrate the 'free run' of economic forces, only to hasten revolution. Liberalism is itself a strongly 'interventionist' state policy39, which appears at a mature stage of the capitalist trajectory. The CMP was born protectionist. In Capital, Marx associates protectionism mostly with the primitive accumulation phase, the moments of which

'are systematically combined together at the end of seventeenth century in England; the combination embraces the colonies, the national debt, the modern tax system, and the system of protection. The methods depend in part on brute force, for instance the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition.'40

And again:

'The system of protection was an artificial means of manufacturing manufacturers, or expropriating independent workers, of capitalizing the national means of production and subsistence, and of forcibly cutting short the transition from a mode of production that was out of date to the modern mode of production. [...] Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, etc., these offshoots of the period of manufacture swell to gigantic proportions during the period of infancy of large-scale industry.'41

Ultimately: “the system of protection originally had the objective of manufacturing capitalists artificially in the mother country”42. Marx died in 1883, and thus was not able to see the protectionist wave of the late 19th century; moreover, his understanding of the phenomenon, essentially limited to tariffs, could not include the later forms that appeared in the 20th century (non-tariff measures, fiscal protectionism). Nevertheless, the Marxian account of protectionism as a means of 'manufacturing manufacturers' allows us to understand, in contrast to what he calls the “free-trade optimists of the present day”43, that the transition from protectionism to free trade is not a one-way trip. The periodic return of protectionism, whether under conditions of backwardness or mature capitalism, can be explained by the need to encourage an industrial comeback or to facilitate the emergence of infant industries under otherwise prohibitive competitive conditions. In one of Marx's invectives against Henry Carey, we can also identify a specific dialectic of protectionism: Carey accuses industrial England of trying to turn the rest of the world into backward agricultural countries, and blames England and Mr. Urquhart in particular for the ruin of Turkey, but “the joke here is that Carey […] wants to prevent the process of separation between agriculture and domestic industry by means of that very system of protection which accelerates it.”44. In short, according to Marx, protectionism under conditions of backwardness is generally adopted to protect small producers from international competition, but the industrial development it stimulates will however lead, in the long run, to their inevitable disappearance.

Development disparities and the international division of labour

Closely related to the previous point, it is important to understand why, from a certain degree of maturity, the entry of newcomers in a certain branch of social production, or the industrial comeback of a certain country, are so difficult to achieve, especially under international conditions of free trade. In Volume III of Capital, in the chapter dedicated to the counter-tendencies to the fall in the rate of profit, Marx states that

'capital invested in foreign trade can yield a higher rate of profit, firstly, because it competes with commodities produced by other countries with less developed production facilities, so that the more advanced country sells its goods above their value, even though still more cheaply than its competitors. […] The same relationship may hold towards the country to which goods are exported and from which goods are imported: i.e. such a country gives more objectified labour in kind than it receives, even though it still receives the goods in question more cheaply than it could produce them itself.'45

Here we are faced with the modifications that the law of value undergoes in its international application, i.e. when economic exchanges, which can be analyzed either as exchanges between individuals or as aggregate exchanges between countries, occur between different levels of average productivity and economic development in general. Under such conditions, Marx points out in Volume I, the most productive labour appears as labour of greater intensity. This means that products of two different labour processes that differ toto caelo in productivity and intensity become comparable as if they were the product of the same labour performed at different degrees of intensity. Thus, one unit of more intensive labour can be exchanged against more units of less intensive labour. Let us now suppose that the food producers of the advanced countries, strengthened by a more advantageous productivity, penetrate the outlet markets (national or transnational) of the producers of the backward countries: we will see at first the former perceive a surplus profit as long as the regulatory price of the branch has not changed; at a later stage, the latter will be progressively excluded from those markets because they cannot keep up with the former, eventually leading to a new regulatory price of the branch. If, however, the producers of advanced countries were to compete with those of the backward countries on the whole social production, the latter would simply disappear, thus suppressing an important source of surplus-profit. Therefore the international division of labour generally takes the form of specialization, through which more advanced countries exchange complex 'high value-added' products against more basic 'low value-added' products. In Marx's time, which was still characterized by colonial domination, this took the form of a “new and international division of labour […] suited to requirement of the main industrial countries”46, which “converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production for supplying the other part, which remains a pre-eminently industrial field”47. If today the polarization of the world between industrial and agricultural countries is arguably much less clear-cut, this is due to the fact that the very form of the international division of labour has become a subject of contestation within the inter-state system, and that the form promoted by the best-performing producers in the advanced areas is periodically challenged (decolonization, non-alignment, etc.).

Immigration and the 'labour market'

The 'labour market' is a notion that Marx took up for mere convenience. In the Marxian unterstanding of the relationship between capital and labour, what is sold is not labour itself (which cannot be a commodity) but labour-power, which is inseparable from its bearer. This distinguishes it from all other commodities, and excludes ipso facto the existence of a 'labour market' in every way similar to that of ordinary commodities: firstly, because labour-power is produced and reproduced under non-mercantile conditions (if it were, it would only be able to transfer its own value to the product, but not to add more value to it, just like machines or raw materials); secondly, because the basket of means of subsistence forming the value of labour-power is not predetermined, but incessantly redefined by negotiation, by the volume of needs historically admitted as necessary, etc. Let us add a third point, which stems from the separation of the worker from the means of production. As we saw in our Outlines, the state plays a large role in creating and maintaining the conditions of the sale and purchase of labour-power. Yet, in order for the 'labour market' to function properly from the point of view of entrepreneurs, a surplus of available workforce is necessary to discipline the behavior of workers. Marx investigates the formation of such a surplus workforce in Volume I of Capital, Section VII, Chapter 23, under the heading of “the progressive production of a relative surplus population or industrial reserve army”48. This production is due, according to Marx, to the relative decrease of necessary labour-power per unit of capital, i.e. to the general increase in productivity linked to the application of science to the production process. In Marx's words, the formation of relative overpopulation is “a law of population peculiar to the capitalist mode of production”49, independent of “the natural increase of population”50, which explains a large part of the “general movements of wages [...] exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army”51, this being linked to “to the periodic alternations of the industrial cycle”52. However, for a variety of reasons that will not be examined here (some of those being linked to the international application of the law of value already mentioned), the production of relative surplus population does not necessarily occur where capitalist development is most advanced, but rather where its endogenous deployment is most impeded. Hence the problem of relocating actual or potential workers from one area to the other, which states address directly or indirectly. Yet, to the same extent that an increase in relative surplus population in the former has a depressing effect on local wages, its decrease in the latter pushes wages upwards, further weakening indigenous capital formation or its importation. The more developed economic subsets have an interest in draining labour-power from the less developed economic subsets, while the latter have an interest in retaining it locally. Each state must take charge of these interests, in a dual relationship with external agents (other states, but not exclusively) and with counteracting pressure coming from the local workforce.

Conclusion: towards a theory of the inter-state system

In this article, we have tried to summarize the Marxian approach to the state in general and the problems posed by it from the perspective of a Marxist theory of the inter-state system. For the most part, such a theory remains to be done. For the time being, we have put forward some working hypotheses by looking in the Marxian text for solutions to the problems we found there. This can only be a beginning, and the spectrum of theoretical issues to be addressed is enormous. Among these, we would like to mention the question of nationalities, that of imperialism in its contemporary forms and, more importantly, that of the breakdown of the international order (in the past and in the future). These questions have been overshadowed for quite some time, but are now coming back to the fore with a vengeance, sometimes even in unprecedented forms. Therefore, this texte should also be read as a call for collective elaboration. It is only through a debate involving multiple voices on these questions that their theoretical treatment can be renewed and put to work in reality. The 'old mole' has not finished digging.

 

References