#state theory

[dreamy-thinkingbeing]

DÍA 3. CONFESIONES INTERNAS. 05/11/2019

Estoy a medio camino entre el cansancio y las ganas de remontar fuerte.

Inicié el curso muy baja de expectativas, muy perdida, en terreno desconocido... Eso ha jugado en mi contra, me deja en bastante desventaja.

Pero creo que soy capaz de remontar de forma relativamente holgada, con mucho esfuerzo, pero el premio a obtener es muy interesante, empezar como nueva.

Ojalá lo logre.

A estas horas ya me puede el sueño...

[zwischenstadt]

Samuel Finer's history of government sidesteps what he describes as 'the extremely obscure and contentious question of how states emerge from primeval and tribal societies' in favour of examining how 'states such as we know them today emerged through aggregation from smaller territorial units or the disaggregation of larger territorial units'... In fact the evidence on primary state formation is not so murky as Finer suggested.  Overall, research on this topic indicates that the process cannot be explained in terms of (1) a surplus produced through intensive agriculture; or (3) the rise of towns and cities.  Even if these factors do facilitate the further development of the state and the subsequent formation of empires, all three factors long predated primary state formation (Service 1975; Spencer 2003).  So they may be enabling factors but cannot trigger state formation.  The archaeological record points instead to the role of expanded capacities for economic and political control over the areas that lie further than a day's round trip from the political centre or capital.  This corresponds to the idea of infrastructural power proposed by Mann (1986, 2008).  Territorial expansion in turn mobilized resources through the exaction of surplus in the form of tributary flows to underwrite this administrative transformation, which thereby created a virtuous circle among bureaucratic governance, resource extraction through tribute, and further territorial expansion.  Such expansion occurred through penetration into the territories of neighbouring polities, which was easier when they were smaller and weaker (Service 1975; Finer 1997a; Spencer 2010).  Like chiefdoms, states usually formed networks based on competitive alliances.  Unlike networks of chiefdoms, however, these networks were periodically centralized into a single political unit, which incorporated several polities; and these may be termed 'empires' (Finer 1997a, 1997b; on empires and imperialism, see also below).  In addition, competition for control spurred political and administrative and military innovation, and this in turn fed into the state's increased capacities for territorializing political power over larger areas and larger populations (Redmond and Spencer 2012; Wright 1977). In sum, the key issue in state formation, which takes states beyond chiefdoms, is the ability to extend territorial control through the logistics of space-time distantiation and through the bureaucratization of a central authority.

Bob Jessop, The State: Past, Present, Future pgs 129-130

Jessop summarizing the tradition of research on ancient state formation. Perhaps of interest to @averyterrible

[feelingpolitical]

Second, instead of the state and nation being real essentialized objects, feminist theories tend to explore them as relational entities that need to be perpetually reproduced through discourses, practices, or material circuits. Feminist scholars explore the power relations behind these constructions, the femininities and masculinities they rely on and reproduce, and their differentiated gender impacts. State processes, policies, institutions, discourses, practices, and norms are shown to be gendered and gendering and constitutive of gender orders. States and nations are also racialized and sexualized in that they use norms around heterosexuality to reproduce the state and nation.

Johanna Kantola, “State/Nation,” in Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, ed. Disch and Hawkesworth, pp. 915-6 

[zwischenstadt]

Rather than taking the US trade deficit as a measure of industrial decline, it is instructive to consider US exports and imports separately.  The growth in the volume of US exports in the two decades up to 2007- even as the trade deficit accumulated- averaged a very robust 6.6 percent, leaving it only marginally behind Germany and China, the world's largest exporters; it was the relative expansion of US imports that was the source of the growing deficit.  The deficit, in other words, primarily came from increased US consumption, which grew faster than in other advanced capitalist countries.  This was partly linked to the very high income growth and conspicuous consumption of the most well-off segments of the US population, but it was also due to much faster population growth than in Europe and Japan, the longer hours worked by much of the US population, and, very significantly, their increased consumer debt.  This was supported by the international flow of funds into the US despite the size of the trade deficit.  It was in good part US consumer spending that maintained effective global demand into the first years of the twenty-first century.  The US trade deficit was not an adequate measure of the overall productive power of American capital; rather, it indicated its place in global capitalism.  The case of the Apple iPod illustrates this at a product level; since its final point of assembly was China, each iPod sold in the US represented an increase in the US trade deficit of $145, even though it involved an increase in the surplus captured by Apple from domestic- and especially- foreign labor. The average annual real rate of growth of the American economy in the quarter-century after the resolution of the crisis of the 1970s (from 1989 to 2007) was 3.5 percent.  This was higher than in any similar period from 1830 to 1950, and was only marginally less than during the so-called postwar 'golden age'; and, unlike then, US GDP growth in the quarter-century after 1983 surpassed that of the other advanced capitalist countries.  In the years from 1950 to 1973, US manufacturing productivity growth averaged 2.5 percent, well below that of the other advanced capitalist countries; between 1983 and 2007, it increased quite dramatically to 3.5 percent, running ahead of all the other G7 economics.  And in terms of attractiveness as a place for capitalists to invest the US was still, despite the wide dispersal of FDI to Europe and Asia by 2007, the largest single recipient of FDI inflows, and the rate of US manufacturing productivity growth ran considerably ahead of the growth in labor compensation at home.  As a result, the share of after-tax corporate profits relative to US GDP earned by American corporations in 2006 was at its highest level since 1945. Moreover, US MNCs' operations abroad consistently contributed about 30 percent to total US profits in the new millennium, compared with less than 20 percent in the 1980s.  At the same time, the foreign operations of so many American banks (in 2007, Goldman Sachs had about 8,000 people in Europe, including consultants, over four-fifths of them in London) were a significant factor in the increasing share of total profit going to US finance.  Notably, those profits increasingly came from the fees charged for the provision of an array of services (some of them payroll and accounting outsourced from industry) rather than returns on loans (the share of the total bank income coming from services other than interest on loans rose from 15 percent to 35 percent between 1990 and 2006). It was largely the failure to take sufficient account of the dominance and integration of American production and finance that led to the misreading of what US trade deficits signaled by way of undermining the value of the dollar and its place as the world currency.  It was the balance of capital flows more than the balance of trade that now determined the dollar's value.  The issue of US 'imbalances' that so many observers were fixated on in the first years of the new millennium failed to capture this central point.  Far from the capital inflows signaling the dollar's weakness, and being significant mainly in offsetting US trade deficits, they highlighted the central role of US banks and MNCs in the global economy, and the extent to which the integration of so many Third World countries was dependent on the pull of both US consumer and financial markets.

Leo Panitch & Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism

[mccaine]

One thought: the severity with which Theresa May’s government is pursuing a ‘hard Brexit’ and ramping up the anti-foreigner sentiment, explicitly against the wishes of organizations like the Institute of Directors, shows that the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” is not the same thing as a mere conveyor belt for the wishes of large capital.

[sanjaygreddy]

Greece and the Eurozone: The Real Stakes

Greece and the Eurozone: The Real Stakes

The events of this week approach the level of the world historical. As so often, the weak link in any claim to systemic rationality proves to be in one or another periphery, in this case Greece. The crisis makes bare the underlying logic propelling certain actors or institutions, their attitudes as well as their internal conflicts. The observation that the actors do have such conflicts is the…

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[actuallyexistingbarbarism]

Critique of ML View of the State

A decisive shortcoming of the conception of the bourgeois state as an instrument in the hands of the capitalist class is that it presupposes a "ruling" class that is both unified and capable of acting, as well as a clearly defined class interest that simply needs an instrument for its implementation. Neither assumption is self-evident. The "economic ruling class" in capitalism consists of capitalists with widely varying, even opposing interests. There is a common interest in the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production, but if the system is not threatened by a revolutionary movement, then this interest is far too general to serve as a guideline for "normal" state action. The interests that determine the state's activity are not just sitting around waiting to be implemented, as is assumed by the instrumentalist conception. Rather, these interests must first be constituted.

p.209, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital  - Michael Heinrich (2012)

[actuallyexistingbarbarism]

Marx in his maturity wrote: 'Freedom consists in the conversion of the State from an organ superimposed on society into one completely subordinated to it..." The abolition of the State altogether remains, a century later, one of the goals of revolutionary socialism. But the supreme significance accorded to its final disappearance, testifies to all the weight of its prior presence in history.

Lineages of the Absolutist State - Perry Anderson.

Found this a really useful book to think about the development of the state alongside the capitalist mode of production.