The City, Industry and The State

Much recent material attempting to analyse the state in advanced capitalist societies from a Marxist perspective has tried to formulate ‘systemic constraints’ on state activity beyond the rather contingent relations of political forces, i.e. to go beyond the usual concerns of political science. Similarly, such Marxist ‘political scientists’ as Miliband or Poulantzas, who posit a ‘relatively autonomous’ field of politics and call for a specific analysis of the political level, have been criticised for their inability to locate the ‘systemic constraints’ imposed upon the state by its relation to the process of accumulation ( Holloway and Picciotto, 1977 :p.82). Their critics, however, often fall into the trap of making a reductionist link between state activity and capitalist accumulation, assuming that the requirements of the latter, the ‘logic of capital’, can be ‘read off unambiguously as specific state policies ( Bullock and Yaffe, 1975 ). One recent article, which attempts to relate the changing forms of state activity to their changing function in the process of accumulation, does manage to avoid the ‘fundamentalist’ error of economic reductionism, but nonetheless has difficulties conceptualising the relation between these systemic limitations and the actual production of economic policy ( Holloway and Picciotto, 1977 ). The authors realise that the requirements of the accumulation process are only fulfilled in the political system (or the economic system for that matter) through a process of class struggle. They conclude that ‘if social and political development cannot simply be derived logically from the formal analysis of capital, this does not mean that the formal analysis is irrelevant: for it explains not only the inevitability of class struggle, it provides also the point of reference and the framework for that struggle, ( Holloway and Picciotto, 1977 :p.94). They emphasise the necessity of including both moments, formal analysis and historical analysis of class conflict, in studies of state activities and politics within capitalist societies. This formulation, while infinitely preferable to the ‘capital logic’ approach, remains at a very high level of abstraction. It is difficult to perceive how it could be applied to the analysis of concrete political conflicts, particularly insofar as one wishes to distinguish between types of regime, national traditions, etc.

Capitalist state · Marxist philosophy · Politics · Process (computing) · Reductionism · Relation (database) · State (computer science) · State function · Political and Economic history of UK and US · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies