Critique

ISSN: 0301-7605 (Print) 1748-8605 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcso20

Global Capital, National State, and the

International
Werner Bonefeld
To cite this article: Werner Bonefeld (2008) Global Capital, National State, and the
International, Critique, 36:1, 63-72, DOI: 10.1080/03017600801892854
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Critique
Vol. 36, No. 1, April 2008, pp. 6372

Global Capital, National State, and the

International1

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Werner Bonefeld

The article revisits the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE) debate on the national
state and the global economy, and concludes with an appeal to internationalism. Its
purpose is to introduce this debate to a new readership. Contemporary analyses of
globalisation and the state tackle issues that were of key importance to this debate*yet
the specific critical insights that the CSE debate brought to the fore are lost in a world in
which ideology is in the process of producing itself. The article argues that regardless of
fashion, these insights are as relevant now as they were then.
Keywords: State; Socialism; Internationalism; Capital and Class
Preface
The following quotations focus well the content and direction of the argument that
I wish to make:
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it
appears as if famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every
means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why?
Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence; too much
industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no
longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on
the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they
are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into
the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The
conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by
them. And how does bourgeois society get over these crises? On the one hand by
enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest
of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.2
1
The article is based on a talk given at the CSE 2006 conference. Originally a set of notes to guide the
presentation, the written version retains its original character but the more obvious jumps and leaps have been
ironed out, and historical references omitted. I am grateful to participants for their comments.
2
K. Marx and F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 1997) pp. 1819.

ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2008 Critique

DOI: 10.1080/03017600801892854

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W. Bonefeld

In the same context, the Manifesto speaks about the cosmopolitan character of the
bourgeoisie and defines the state is its executive committee. The two remaining
quotations focus on this:
Although the state is constituted politically on a national basis, its class character is
not defined in national terms, the capitalist law of property and contract
transcending national legal systems, and world money transcending national
currencies.

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Above all, the state remains an explicitly capitalist state, not a neutral agency
standing outside of class conflict, and even sophisticated left strategies of working
in and against the state . . . had little chance of success.3

The Global Economy and the State in the Context of the CSE
In the face of the failure of the Russian Revolution and against the background of
1968, both of Prague and Paris, critical re-assessments of the purpose, role and
function of the state started again in the late 1960s. These reassessments crystallised
first in the critique of orthodox communist stamocap theory and drew on themes of
class struggle and social praxis developed earlier by, amongst others, Antonio
Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and Karl Korsch. Within the context of the CSE, and drawing
on Peter Burnham, Simon Clarke and Hugo Radice, Marxs critique of the capitalist
state was well summed up by the old chestnut of the state as the executive
committee of the bourgeoisie. That is to say, the purpose of capital is to make profit,
and the state is the political form of this purpose. Instead of bringing the state back
in, the CSE argued that the class struggle had to be brought back in to allow for a
proper critical reassessment of the form of the state, its social constitution, role and
purpose.4
In the UK, critical re-examination led first to the Poulantzas/Miliband debate*in
essence, as Radice notes, the structure/agency debate transposed from mainstream
sociology. The CSE contribution to the state debate criticised approaches that
accepted the contingent nature of statesociety relations. For the CSE statesociety
relations were determined by the form of society, that is, capitalist social relations.
The Poulantzas/Miliband debate only touched the surface. Instead of the Marxian
conception of the social relations of production, the two protagonists were seen to
operate within the traditional confines of bourgeois social theory, according to which
3
S. Clarke, The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form, in W.
Bonefeld, R. Gunn and K. Psychopedis (eds), Open Marxism, Vol.1: Dialectics and History (London: Pluto Press,
1992) p. 136. H. Radice, Globalization, Labour and Socialist Renewal, Capital & Class, no. 75 (2001), pp. 113
126, cited at p. 118.
4
P. Burnham, Marx, International Political Economy and Globalisation, Capital & Class, no. 75 (2001),
pp. 103112. S. Clarke. The State Debate, in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1991).
H. Radice, The Developmental State under Global Neo-Liberalism: Who is Doing What to Whom, Paper
presented at Departmental Seminar, Department of Politics, University of York, March 2006.

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social theory is either a theory of structures or of social action. Indeed, Simon

Clarkes seminal contribution showed that both sides of the debate remained locked
in a tradition running from Smith to Weber, basically a conventional social theory
interpretation of Marx that neglected especially the constitutive role played in Marxs
critique by the theories of value and surplus-value, that is, Marxs class analysis of
bourgeois economic and political forms.5
At issue was thus the examination of the state, neither as a political derivative of
economic necessity as propounded by orthodox conceptions of economic base and
political superstructure; nor as an objectively given political structure that required
analysis by a Marxist political theory; nor, finally, as an indeterminate thing, which
purpose and content like the proverbial black box is contingent upon, and defined by,
the balance of class forces. The CSE approach conceived of the state as the political
form of bourgeois society. Instead of analyses that emphasise either state over
markets, or markets over state, it understood both*market and state*as forms of
capitalist social relations. This understanding reassessed the state according to themes
of class struggle and social praxis, recovering the critical dimension of the Manifestos
denunciation of the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. In terms of
the critique of political economy, the focus on capital as a social relationship
overcame, at least in its critical intension, the orthodox dichotomy between objective
structures and social action by arguing that theoretical mysteries find their rational
explanation in the understanding of human social praxis, however perverted this
praxis might be in the form of the object.
The Early Days
The relationship between state and (global) capital was raised within the context of
the CSE at its very first conference in 1970.6 The flavour of the argument and the
response that it provoked are surprisingly contemporary. Following Clarkes account,
Robin Murray presented a paper on the internationalisation of capital and the
national state. He argued that the internationalisation of capital had undermined
the ability of the state to regulate the national economy according. Theoretically, his
take on internationalisation and national state was captured by the idea of a
territorial non-coincidence between (global) capital and (national) state. The
economy was seen to have de-nationalised itself qua inter-nationalisation, and this
process was seen to have diminished the capacity of the state to regulate its national
economy in a socially comprehensive way. Instead, internationalisation of capital
asserted the limits of accumulation upon the national state form, restricting the
democratic element of the liberal-democratic state to its liberal foundation. Simply
5
H. Radice, op. cit. S. Clarke, Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzass Theory of the State, in S. Clarke (ed.),
The State Debate, op. cit. On the two social theories, see V. Vanberg, Die beiden Soziologien (Tubingen: Mohr,
1975).
6
This part draws on S. Clarke, The State Debate . . ., op. cit.

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put, internationalisation led to the retreat of social democratic state and favoured the
emergence of the neo-liberal state.
Robin Murrays notion of the territorial non-coincides between state and economy
build on Kindelbergers argument that the national state was just about through as
an economic unit.7 He, too, argued that the economy had internationalised, and
internationalisation compromised the economic capacity of the state. Internationalisation was characterised by the world-wide operation and thus global reach and
influence, of what were then called transnational companies (TNCs).8 Research into
TNCs*not multinational corporations (MNCs), this term came later*developed
into a growth industry during the 1970s, and inspired the creation of a specialised
agency, the Commission of Trans-national Corporations to look into matters of law,
regulation, and taxation.9 To sum up, the apparent internationalisation of capital led
Murray to pose the question whether national states will continue to be the primary
structure within the international economic system, or whether the expanded
territorial range of capitalist production will require the parallel expansion of
coordinating state functions.10 In todays language, Murrays demand for the
expansion of state functions is discussed either in terms of the need for a
cosmopolitan re-organisation of social democracy or in terms of the creation of
supranational governance mechanisms that provide an institutional anchor for
national Keynesian responses to neo-liberal globalisation.11 Many of todays
discussions on globalisation appear strangely removed from these earlier attempts
at conceptualisation. In fact, conventionally contemporary globalisation is contrasted
to the regime of a triumphant national Fordism of early 1970s, and the argument is
about distinct periods of capitalism, one marked by its national organisation, the
other by its discovery of the world market. Capitalism is, of course, a very dynamic
system and is in the process of constant change. However, discovery of new capitalist
regimes, and their periodic transition from one to the other, suggests a shrinking of
historical consciousness. Such shrinking is linked with the principle of progress in
bourgeois society. It justifies forgetfulness and justifies what is forgotten.
The internationalisation thesis of the 1970s pointed critical analysis in the right
direction, but akin to todays conception of a new capitalist period, it remained
7

C. Kindelberger, American Business Abroad (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969), p. 207.
Compared with A. E. Berle, The 20th Centurys Capitalist Revolution (New York: Brace, 1954),
Kindelbergers view was neither original nor radical in its conclusions. Berles study suggested that
government should be run by private firms since they are bigger than government, and have at their disposal
greater resources in the form of a skilled, experienced and therefore efficient and effective service-providers who
know that time is money. On Berle, see J. Agnoli, The Market, the State, and the End of History, in W. Bonefeld
and K. Psychopedis (eds) The Politics of Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000).
9
Kees van der Pijls influential research into transnational class relations captured these developments in
theoretical terms. See K. van der Pijl, Class Formation at the International Level, Capital & Class, no. 9 (1979),
pp. 121.
10
On this see P. Murray, as cited in S. Picciotto, The Internationalisation of Capital and the International
State System, in S. Clarke (ed) The State Debate, op. cit., p. 214.
11
Cf. D. Held, Global Covenant: The Social Democratic Alternative to the Washington Consensus (Cambridge:
Polity, 2004), and D. Hirst and G. Thompson, Globalisation in Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
8

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fundamentally flawed. First, it was based on the assumption that state and capital are
two distinct forms of social organisation, one of which determines the other. In this
view, the deterritorialisation of capital entails the subordination of the state to
capitalist interests, to the detriment of the states relative autonomy vis-a`-vis the
economic*it seems as if internationalisation made the state fully capitalist. Then
there is, second, the assumption that prior to internationalisation, capital really was a
national thing, under the wings of the national state and subject to democratic forms
of accountability and regulation. That is to say, prior to internationalisation the state
appears to have been more than just a capitalist state. Internationalisation of capital is
thus treated as a break in the history of capitalism, from a national, state-centred
capitalist formation to an international capitalism, in which the state, in the words of
Robert Cox, transformed from an agency primarily concerned with the provision of
welfare into a transmission belt, and thus a mere instrument, of global capitalist
interests.12 Finally, in contradiction to the critical intention of the approach, the
internationalisation of capital remained in fact a state-centred affair! Internationalisation conceived of the world market as a system of inter-national economic
relations, suggesting that the world market was the sum of many national economies,
which related to each other in the form of complex interdependency where each
economy was seen to inter-penetrate the other. The inter-nationalisation of capital
could thus be seen to amount either to a modern form of mercantilism or to a
complex system of interdependent and interpenetrating national capitalisms.13
Subsequent developments were seen to favour the latter view: globalisation studies
fed on each other, including those conducted by globalisation sceptics who argued
that globalisation dependent on the assertion of state power and who therefore
argued in favoured of state-led, national alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation.14
The distinctiveness of the CSE approach is in part due to the way in which it
developed the notion of internationalisation. As Simon Clarke put it, capital tries to
overcome the barrier of the limited domestic market by seeking out markets on a
global scale. That is to say, global markets are the condition of domestic markets, and
vice versa. Indeed, capital was from its birth a global power. Both, the establishment
of the national state and the world market, were products of the same social struggles
that revolutionised feudal social relations. In this way, then, the question of the
national integration of the state could not be divorced from that of the integration of
12
R. Cox, Global Perestroika, in R. Miliband and L. Panitch (eds) The Socialist Register: New World Order?
(London: Merlin Press, 1992). For critique, see P. Burnham, Globalization, Depoliticization and Modern
Economic Management, in W. Bonefeld and K. Psychopedis (eds) The Politics of Change, op. cit. See also the
debate in A. Bieler et al., Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour (London: Palgrave, 2006).
13
J. Hirsch, Kapitalismus ohne Alternative (Hamburg: VSA, 1989), p. 92, emphasis added.
14
More recently, mercantilist visions of a world of trading states have reasserted themselves in the face of the
apparent revival of states as the primary agents in world politics, be it in the form of US imperialism, Chinas
state-based search for raw materials as a challenge to market-based globalization, or the apparent failure of a
supranational EU. The pendulum continues to swing from market to state and from state to market. Just like
Says law, where demand explains supply, and conversely, supply explains demand, the argument moves in
circles. The state points to the market, and the market points to the state, none is explained.

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the international state system.15 Picciotto argued that the emergence of the national
state originated as an international system of states16*a system of inter-state
relations that, as Marx had argued, is founded on: the international relations of
production. International division of labour. International exchange and import.
Rate of exchange.17 Furthermore, this inter-state system was, from its inception,
embedded within the global context of production and exchange. In other words, the
world market is integrated into the national economy.18 In short, the CSE
approached state and economy as distinct forms of the same fundamental relations
of production, and argued that the world market subsists, from its inception, in and
through the territory of states.19
Just what national alternative [is] there to the neo-liberal orthodoxy?20
Following Clarkes account, Murrays point that the internationalisation of capital
diminishes the relative autonomy of the national state was criticised most notably by
Bill Warren.21 He argued that internationalisation did not effect the autonomy of the
state, that the class character of the state was structurally determined, and predicted
that central bankers, international organisations and State policy-making bodies
[would soon] chain down the Euro-dollar monster so that it is no longer available to
do the bidding of the large firms.22 Warren seemed to have identified capital with
productive capital and capitalist accumulation with productive accumulation,
rejecting monetary accumulation as parasitic. His prophecy was repeated some 18
years later by Austin Mitchell, who argued that the state will make money its servant
so that it is put to work for growth and jobs rather than the selfish purposes of the
merchants of greed.23 Now, almost 20 years after Mitchell, the prophecy still holds,
from Stiglitz via Tobin to Panitch.
Whatever the political differences between Warren and Mitchell, both agree that
the state has the power to tackle what today is called neo-liberal, financial
globalization in favour of productive accumulation*economic growth and jobs.
This conception of the power of the national state still holds sway today. The*
undisputed*circumstance that the global economy depends on the assertion of state
15

S. Clarke, Keynesianism, Monetarism and the Crisis of the State (Aldershot: Edward and Elgar, 1988),
pp. 143, 178, 179.
16
S. Picciotto, op. cit., p. 218.
17
K. Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), p. 108.
18
C. von Braunmuhl, On the Analysis of the Capitalist Nation State within the World Market Context, in J.
Holloway and S. Picciotto (eds) State and Capital (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), pp. 163, 168.
19
For recent elaborations, see P. Burnham, Capital, Crisis and the International State System, and J.
Holloway, Global Capital and the National State, both in W. Bonefeld and J. Holloway (eds) Global Capital,
National State and the Politics of Money (London: Palgrave, 1996). See also W. Bonefeld, The Spectre of
Globalisation, in W. Bonefeld and K. Psychopedis, op. cit.
20
H. Radice, Globalization, Labour . . ., op. cit., p. 118.
21
S. Clarke, The State Debate, op. cit.
22
B. Warren, cited in S. Picciotto, op. cit., pp. 214215.
23
A. Mitchell, Competitive Socialism (London: Unwin, 1989), p. 61.

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power, is taken to mean that the struggle for state power is paramount in order to
combat neo-liberal capitalism. According to this view, the so-called decline in
the power of the national state has been exaggerated to favour specific class interests.
The state operates forcefully to advance these interests and, since its power is
undiminished, it remains the pre-eminent instrument for social change. As Leo
Panitch sees it, rather than leaving the state to operate as an efficient agency
for capitalist globalization, the left needs to struggle for the state in an attempt
to transform it into a creative agency of cooperation, decommodification and
democratization.24 It really is unfortunate that political analyses and demands
for socialist transformation remain typically national in their focus. It is equally
unfortunate that many broadly progressive writers downplay the significance of
globalisation in favour of a political strategy that Radice has rightly labelled as
progressive nationalism.25 The espousal of the national state as an instrument
of socialist transformation abstracts from the form of the state and instead suggests
that the capitalist state is neo-liberal because the balance of class forces in favour of
neo-liberal globalisation defines it as such.
One of the most consistent socialist critics of neo-liberal globalisation has been Leo
Panitch. He urges the Left to reorient strategic discussions . . . towards the
transformation of the state, to achieve a radical redistribution of productive
resources, income and working time. For this to occur, a change in the balance of
class forces is essential. Furthermore, the social-democratic transformation of the
state requires a shift towards a more inwardly oriented economy.26 He envisages a
form of economic development that combines national protectionism with economic
planning and redistribution of wealth from capital to labour. His socialist version of a
national economy appears persuasive*yet appearances are often deceptive and on
closer inspection tend to reveal themselves as myth.27
To his credit, Leo Panitch is at least clear about the desired outcome of his statecentred anti-globalisation demands. In the work of, say, Hirst and Thompson, and
Linda Weiss, labour is conspicuous by its absence. According to Weiss, state capacity
remains vital for economic modernisation, and central to its success. National
competitiveness is seen to be dependent on the state either in the form of, for
example, the neo-liberal state of Anglo-Saxon capitalism or the corporatist state of
Rhineland capitalism. Hirst and Thompson envisage a supranationally anchored and
coordinated national modernisation strategy that combats neo-liberal globalisation in
favour of a politically controlled and democratically balanced modernisation of
economic relations. These authors thus agree with Hirsch that globalisation has
24
L. Panitch, The State in a Changing World: Social-Democratizing Global Capitalism?, Monthly Review,
50:5 (1998).
25
H. Radice, Responses to Globalization: A Critique of Progressive Nationalism, New Political Economy, 5:1
(2000), pp. 519.
26
L. Panitch, Globalisation and the State, in L. Panitch and R. Miliband (eds) The Socialist Register (London:
Merlin Press, 1994), pp. 87, 89. L. Panitch, The New Imperial State, New Left Review, no. 2 (MarchApril 2000),
pp. 520.
27
See H. Radice, The National Economy: A Keynesian Myth?, Capital & Class, no. 22 (1984), pp. 111140.

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W. Bonefeld

forced the state to become a competition state*itself a highly dubious concept since
it suggests that capitalist states primary occupation in the past was not to ensure
economic competitiveness.28 Weiss argues for a differential approach: in order to
retain competitiveness, different states adopt distinct modernisation strategies,
depending on their respective socio-economic structures of development; Hirst and
Thompson argue that modernisation cannot be to the self-destructive forces of the
market but needs to be regulated by the good offices of the state to secure its viability
and democratic legitimacy; and Panitch argues for the social-democratisation of
capitalism by means of a change in the balance of class forces. He does not conceive
of the state as the political form of capitalist social relations but sees it as an objective
field of tension between distinct social interests, and it is the struggle between these
interests that decides state purpose. That is, the state is conceived as a sort of political
opportunity structure that social interests struggle to define to advance their specific
interests. However, although state purpose is thus defined by the*always contingent*balance of class forces, there needs to be a balance between them. For this
reason, the state is not just a field of opportunity inasmuch as capital is seen to put a
structural constraint on the state*however, thus, the class forces might define state
purpose, the economic determines in the last instance. What, then, is the content and
scope of a social democratic capitalism?
There is no doubt that honest and sincere pursuit of social democratic reform can
improve conditions. Humanisation of inhuman conditions points the struggle for
socialism in the right direction*but paradoxically, it is also self-contradictory. The
humanising effort presupposes as eternal those same inhuman conditions that
provoke the humanising effort in the first place. The CSE debate on the state focused
this paradox well. It argued that the social democratic theory of the state . . . focused
on the institutional separation of the state from the economy, and so stressed the
autonomy of the state as a political institution. This analytical separation of the
political from the economic was based theoretically on a radical separation of
production from distribution.29 Thus, and following Clarke, the capitalist concern
for profit transformed into the national interest in economic growth. A social
democratic policy of re-distribution and full employment depends on economic
growth, and thus on an internationally competitive domestic economy. There can be
no redistribution of wealth without the production of wealth qua exploitation and
that is, redistribution of wealth presupposes the product of labour as the property of
capital. In other words, the social democratic policy of distribution translates the
demand for employment and social security into a politics of economic growth, and
that is, into pressure on the state to facilitate the increase in the rate of accumulation.
Thus, the working class remains always the object of state power. The judicial power
of the state stands behind the appropriation of labour without equivalent by the
28
L. Weiss, The Myth of the Powerless State (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998). D. Hirst and G. Thompson,
Globalisation . . ., op. cit. J. Hirsch, Globalisation of Capital, Nation-States and Democracy, Studies in Political
Economy, no. 54 (1997), pp. 3958.
29
S. Clarke, The State Debate . . ., op. cit, pp. 34.

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capitalist class, while preventing the working class from using its collective power to
assert the right to the product of its labour.30 In sum, the purpose of the form of the
state is entailed in its bourgeois character, that is, to govern over the labour force.31
The old chestnut of the state as the executive committee of the bourgeoisie sums this
up well.

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Conclusion
My conclusion is in the form of an appeal to internationalism. The attempt to hold
the international division of labour down to the national division of labour is most
dangerous and disarms the Left. This conception of socialism as a national affair
reflects one of the most powerful legacies of the twentieth-century political and
economic thinking: the theory of socialism in one country.32 The last century has
taught us many lessons. Chief among them is that socialism can only mean
internationalism. The national division of labour presupposes the international
division of labour and national protectionism amounts to a defence within, not
against, the world market. Capitalist social relations are always already world market
relations.
The realities of globalisation should not be attacked as an ideology that masks the
enduring capacity of the state to reform or transform capitalism. Nor should the
world market society of capital be seen as an inter-national economic order in which
the rich countries exploit the poor countries. Neo-mercantilist imperialism is indeed
a real force in the expansion of capitalist reproduction through dispossession
supported by means of military direction. Then as now, Marxs insight that a great
deal of capital, which appears today in the United States without certificate of birth,
was yesterday, in England, the capitalized blood of children, remains a powerful
judgment of contemporary conditions.33 That is to say, neo-imperialism cannot be
understood in abstraction from global capitalist class relations. It is, of course,
politically easy for a peripheral bourgeoisie to suppress internal revolt by blaming
the continuation of imperialist forms of domination of their countries, and in doing
so to masks their own complicity in this domination.34 There is thus need for a
realistic conception of the struggle for human emancipation, a conception that does
not succumb to the imagery of the form of the state as a potential force of national
liberation against the exigencies of global capitalist interests, and that, instead,
rediscovers class struggle as a laboratory of the communist individual.35
30
S. Clarke, State, Class Struggle, and the Reproduction of Capital, in S. Clarke (ed.) The State Debate, op.
cit, p. 198.
31
J. Hirsch, op. cit., p. 47.
32
H. Radice, Globalization . . ., op. cit., p. 113.
33
K. Marx, Capital, vol. I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983), p. 707.
34
A. Hoogvelt, Globalization and the Post-Colonial World (London: Palgrave, 1997), p. 49.
35
On this, see W. Bonefeld, The Capitalist State: Illusion and Critique, in W. Bonefeld (ed.) Revolutionary
Writing (New York: Autonomedia, 2003).

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We must therefore not only attain to a conception of history that is in keeping

with [the] insight that the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of
emergency in which we live, is not the exception but the rule.36 We must also
develop a conception of struggle that understands that the everyday struggle over the
production and appropriation of surplus value in every individual workplace and
every local community . . . is the basis of the class struggle on a global scale.37 Cutting
struggle down to the national level as the basic, given unit of the inter-national order
coerces the global character of this struggle, divides it in the form of competing
territorial units, and thus treats them as competing factors of production that can
also be called upon as a military resource. Proletarian internationalism is the only
answer to (neo-)liberalism, especially against the background of its political crisis.
Paraphrasing Simon Clarke one more time, if the prospect of dictatorship, populist
nationalism and war seems unlikely now, it seemed equally unlikely some 100 years
ago, and more likely today than only yesterday.
Postscript
The critique of neo-liberalism is necessary. However, this critique should not be
reduced to a critique in favour of the national state as an instrument of democratic
renewal against neo-liberalism.38 The capitalist state, however nationally maintained,
transnationalised, or spaced out, is fundamentally a liberal state.39 That is to say, the
critique of the world market society of capital has also to be a critique of its political
form. In short, all who live from their labour and the sale of their labour power find
themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which
society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the State; in
order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the State.40
The communist individual is not something that can be decreed by the force of law,
the state. The form of the state presupposes the separation of the mass of the
population from the means of production. This separation is the social basis on
which capital and its political form, the state, rests. A society where the free
development of each is the condition for the free development of all, cannot rest on
this separation. It is this separation that renders human productive power a
commodity, and it this separation that the communist individual subverts in her
struggle for a human world.

36
W. Benjamin, Geschichtsphilosphische Thesen in Zur Kritik der Gewalt und andere Aufsatze (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1965), p. 84.
37
S. Clarke, Class Struggle and the Global Overaccumulation of Capital, in R. Albritton et al. (eds), Phases of
Capitalist Development, (London: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 9091.
38
On this see W. Bonefeld, Anti-Globalization and the Question of Socialism, Critique, 34:1 (2006),
pp. 3959, and W. Bonefeld, Die Zeit der Transformation, AK  Zeitung (Berlin/Hamburg), no. 515, 16 March
2007, p. 31.
39
Cf. N. Brenner, New State Spaces (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
40
K. Marx and F. Engels, Die deutsche Ideology, MEW 3 (Berlin: Dietz, 1962), p. 77.