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3. State Power and the Power of Money

This chapter and the next analyze four key components of capitalism—the state and money (Chapter 3), and markets and firms (Chapter 4)—to show their interdependence and contradictions. All are essential to capitalism’s remarkably dynamic history, and to its robustness in the face of so much change. While it is clearly important that these relations interlock effectively enough to produce a real “system,” at the same time, the ways they fall short of the dreams of orthodox economics are, in some cases, the reason the system works. Sometimes, the elements of the capitalist mode of production that fail to fully play their assigned role actually help the system reproduce itself. In fact, if capitalism worked exactly as some orthodox theories suggest, it would not have lasted very long at all.

The State

Capitalism is premised upon two kinds of power: (1) private economic power that comes from the control of property and profit-making; and (2) coercive power exercised by states in (and often beyond) bounded national territories.17 These two types of power exist side by side, but they have an inconsistent relationship, by turns complementary, conflictual, or indifferent. There are, however, a couple of things we should keep in mind about them.

First, we should be clear what power means, and how the two kinds work in practice. I am using the word “power” in the somewhat mainstream sense to describe authority or control and the way in which it is exercised, not in the “positive” or “productive” sense associated with influential French philosopher Michel Foucault. In other words, I mean both the form power takes, and the ways it is held.18 So, when we think of private economic power in capitalism, we are thinking of the form that power takes and the ways it is exercised, i.e., the power enterprises and individuals can exercise over human relations by means of their access to, possession of, and/or control over money, means of production, labour power, etc. They exercise this power in an attempt to help things turn out the way they prefer.

When we think of state power over territory, we think precisely of what defines the state as the state. In sociologist Max Weber’s classic definition, the state is that set of institutions which enjoys “the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”19 This power is coercive: the state, by virtue of its control over the police, law, military, etc., has the power to coerce you, if you are inside its territory, to do or not do certain things, and to punish you if you don’t follow the rules, which the state itself determines. Virtually all capitalist states limit these powers via laws, constitutions and “bills of rights,” for example requiring the police to have a warrant to enter and search your home. But the state (at least in theory) remains the sole possessor of this territorially defined coercive power.

One of the key features of modern political life that anticapitalists must think hard about, however, is the fact that in capitalist liberal democracy, state power is rarely straightforwardly coercive. In practice, states require, and actively seek, legitimacy from their citizens. Through a variety of mechanisms—the most obvious are elections—capitalist liberal democratic states try to build some consensus around their power, so that subjects see it as fair, right, or natural. Indeed, I would suggest that any attempt to create a mass-based oppositional politics, at least in the global North, will fail if it frames liberal democracy as simply an instrument of elite class rule or as a fancily-clad capitalist police state. There are moments—like the oppressive response to the G-8 protests in Genoa in 2001—when it might seem so, but in terms of a larger and more incisive political critique, the state = coercion argument is shallow, and has limited purchase.

This is not to say that the coercive part goes away. You might think, quite reasonably, that since coercion is always hovering in the background, the consent part is a bit of a joke: if you don’t consent, you get coerced, meaning the consent is not all that consensual. At the level of the isolated individual, this is true. But if you think about it at a collective level, the consent part is much more evident. If every single person refused to consent, the state’s coercive power would almost certainly be insufficient. The stability of the liberal democratic state as an institutional complex depends on the often tacit, sometimes explicit endorsement of its citizenry. Modern state power is constituted by a complicated, shifting, and contingent combination of coercion on the part of the state and consent on the part of the population.

On a related note, it is not only the state that can coerce. Private economic power rarely lacks some coercive aspect. Think of the power your employer has over you, or the power that the banking industry has in contemporary capitalism. Market power (the power to influence price determination and revenue flows; discussed in detail in Chapter 4) and the employment relation both have coercive elements that work through the supposedly consensual exchange relation. Banks can push through laws in their interest because they can use their market power to disrupt the whole economy—to coerce the government to meet their demands. Your boss can require you work faster, or smile wider, with the threat of losing your job. That is coercion.

The combination of coercion and consent (operated by both capital and the state) produces a relation known as “hegemony,” a term first elaborated in this sense by a justly famous pre–World War II Italian communist named Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci spent the last decade of his life in Mussolini’s fascist prisons, during which time he penned a remarkable collection of notebooks that have, since their posthumous publication, joined the ranks of the most influential works of radical political thought ever written. Gramsci was the kind of radical anticapitalist theorist that even those opposed to “theory” admire, since his theoretical efforts were always aimed at making sense, for political work, of the concrete contexts in which struggle unfolded. I cannot recommend reading his prison notebooks highly enough (and for those familiar with his work, you will hopefully recognize his inspiration in this book).

Gramsci worked out his idea of hegemony while he was reading the work of Lenin, trying to understand the means through which communism might reconfigure the political and ideological terrain of interwar Europe, Italy in particular. In that context, fascism and liberal democracy seemed to direct the to and fro of everyday life so powerfully that, in many instances, the state and its allies did not even need to monitor the security of capitalist social relations. Those relations seemed so natural to most people that they reproduced the system themselves. In Gramsci’s formulation, this was a product of capital’s hegemony, its power to shape the “common sense” we tacitly share about the state, the ruling classes, and their power: that those relations are natural, that they serve a necessary function, that they are the only way to keep the peace. Those in power construct an effective hegemony when the existing order appears to be not only in their interests, but in everyone’s interest. It is the practices that render a given social formation ideologically “normal.”

The main point is that when thinking about the two constitutive logics of power in capitalism, we must remind ourselves that neither of them are “pure.” Many ways of exercising power coexist, and none can be separated from other axes of social difference that have been used to dominate different times and places, such as racialization, patriarchy, and nationalism. Nevertheless, I believe it is helpful, at least as a “first cut,” to think of the two types of power as having different dynamics. They also have specific spatial implications.

The spatial dimension often gets overlooked, but it is important. Different types of power operate in, and produce, different kinds of space.20 On the one hand, power in capitalism can focus on bounding and exercising control within specific territories. Inside that bounded space, whether it be the home country or a colony or something else, the state does its thing, controlling, deciding, coercing, convincing, etc. When those exerting this kind of power want more of it, they tend to try to expand the territory, so that it includes more people and resources. When the state exercises its authority in this way, capital can clearly benefit by producing goods and services in the territory, extracting natural resources and distributing them between the colony and the metropolis, and so on. This “territorial” logic, in which the state and capital cooperate, benefits both. The Spanish colonial era of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries is a clear example of this logic: Spain territorially enclosed much of the Caribbean and the Americas in the interests of accumulation in the home country and in elite colonial outposts. This kind of power persists in our post-colonial time, for example, via the global expansion of consumer markets and production and supply chains overseen by multinational corporations like Nestlé, or by “conditional” development grants like those doled out in Africa by the Canadian International Development Agency (which require the local state to contract Canadian firms for the development work). The increasing dominance of nominally “foreign” markets and resources by capital and states based in the global North is as spatial as it is an “economic” process.

The second logic of power and space, which arguably characterizes today’s financial capitalism, is less about controlling territory, than controlling flows between or across territories. This logic of power can also be enjoyed by the state and capital together, since the state benefits greatly from the wealth generated by capital when it compels and directs the flows of goods and services. Think of the wealth generated in London and New York by the fact that those cities are the hubs of the modern financial system. England and the US would not be as globally influential as they are without this power, which is not territorial in the colonial sense. Of course, recent US and UK imperial forays in the Middle East again demonstrate that there are no pure types.

We should also note that these power dynamics are not necessarily well-coordinated or complementary, either on the part of capital-as-a-whole or capitalist nation-states. Different states and their domestic capitals can pursue different logics at the same time. For example, Spanish colonial power died at least partly because the Dutch took control of the ways that Spain financed its ventures—flows of capital beat territorial colonialism. Alternatively, US imperialism in the Arab states has long irked UK capitalists, who, though untroubled by the imperialist core of the US program of action, feel as though they were “there first” (and indeed, it was British imperialism that created many of the states in the Middle East).

In light of the history of these logics of capitalist power, Ingham makes the crucial point that it was precisely the territorial competition between states (in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, when the modern state system started taking shape) that led to the adoption of national debt as a way to finance military ventures for territorial conquest. Since the debt was financed by the emerging and newly powerful bourgeoisie—the first real capitalists, who increasingly had the money the state needed—this arrangement gave both the state and (what we would now call) capital an interest in each other’s long-term welfare. The state needed a healthy bourgeoisie to lend it money, and the bourgeoisie needed a healthy state to generate profits on its investment in government debt, in access to new resources and markets, and in production (which requires the social peace the state’s coercive power helps ensure).

This development is the basis for Ingham’s most important argument: that this interdependence of the state and its capitalist class is the historical source of the “common sense” understanding of the two as relatively autonomous spheres of social life. Since both the state and capital depended on the welfare of the other, they agreed to leave each other to their respective spheres. If capitalists demanded “freedom”—i.e., laissez-faire economic arrangements—and had the money the state needed to finance its war and imperial conquest, then it made sense for the state to back off. And in return, if the state provided capital with protection of its property rights and essential infrastructure for commerce (like roads), then it made sense to let the state do its thing.

In this relationship, the state (the realm of formal institutional “Politics,” with a capital “P”) came to be understood as providing the social container for the realm of activities we now call “the economy.” By the mid-seventeenth century, at least among the European bourgeoisie, “Politics” and “the economy” were no longer understood as one set of phenomena associated with the functioning of the national collective, but as two distinct realms of collective life. It is a basic argument, for instance, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, an occasionally notorious, oft-misunderstood, and enormously influential tract published in England in 1651. Although what Hobbes was “really” trying to say is still debated, there is general consensus that one of his key claims is that a self-sufficient “civil society” (i.e., the private economy) can thrive of its own accord only where a powerful state guarantees the social order.

Whatever its historical basis, the idea that the Politics-economy separation is “natural” must be rejected. Indeed, as the briefest critical glance at everyday life suggests, it is a myth (albeit a very powerful one), and any common sense it has today is a historical product of liberal capitalism. There is absolutely nothing inevitable about it. Even granting the fantastical notion that the state is the sole realm of politics (I suppose it is the sole realm of “Politics”), the claim that the state and the economy do not constitute and determine each other was blatantly disproven by the world in Hobbes’ time, just as it is disproven today.

But we talk about “the economy” in contemporary capitalism as if it were an independent realm, unaffected, or at least potentially unaffected, by the state and social life more generally, a total and complete impossibility. Yet, precisely because this is how the system is widely perceived, it is crucial to consider explicitly the work these ideas do. Ingham is very good on this. He says there are three main ways the state interacts with “the economy,” and, although they are not so easily separable, the distinctions are useful. They are:

1. State provision/production of social peace;

2. State maintenance of capitalist social relations (often via “liberal democracy”); and

3. Direct and indirect state participation in the economy.

Social peace is both a precondition and a goal of modern capitalist hegemony, and the state is a crucial—but not the only—means by which social peace is maintained. This is not to say, however, that capitalism can only develop in a “peaceful” context. Nor is it to say that the coercive power in capitalism sticks happily to its own “proper” realms of social relations, like policing or the justice system, leaving markets and their participants to “peacefully” pursue their interests. There are times, for example, when capitalist markets—which are supposed to be purely “consensual”—can operate in a context of more coercion and less consensus, and forms of coercive power can certainly move into “spheres” of social life where in theory they do not belong—markets in Mafia protection are a good example. Yet, while capitalism can sometimes work in such contexts, they are not indicative of the capitalist state’s relation to “the economy.” Mafia hits in Moscow and Russian oligarchs’ strong-arm expropriation of public wealth via terror and theft is not really hegemony in any meaningful Gramscian sense, and it tells us little about the role of the state.

Successful hegemonic projects necessitate both coercive capacity on the part of the governors and consent on the part of the governed. In other words, the state and the social relations it protects must be granted, at least by a significant part of the population, sufficient legitimacy. Capitalism requires legitimacy. What is not so clear, however, is the means through which it acquires legitimacy: are we fooled into acquiescing to capitalism by cultural institutions like the church, or by transactions that cheat us in ways we don’t understand? Are we “bought off” by the welfare state, basic amenities, and the possibility of upward mobility? Is capitalism the “best possible” or “least bad” system, thus meriting our reasoned endorsement? Furthermore, to what extent does the state participate in the legitimation process? If we are dupes, is it the state that dupes us? Capitalists? Both? If we are bought off, surely the state is important, but in whose interest is it acting? Is it extracting from capitalists in the interests of workers? Or is it appeasing workers in the interests of capitalists? There is, of course, no one universal answer to these questions.

It seems certain that much of modern capitalism’s legitimacy derives from its supposed mutually interdependent relationship with liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is focused on individual rights, freedom of exchange, and procedural consistency (i.e., the rules of the game apply to all members of the polity, including those who exercise state power). It is commonly assumed that liberal democratic states are the optimal means through which to determine, and enforce, the rules of the capitalist game. The provision and protection of property rights is again a great example—without it, capitalist exchange would be impossible. Who would buy something if they could not be sure that after the transaction they will own it? Who would buy something if they could not be sure the seller had the right to sell it? Because liberal democracy did not exist prior to capitalism, many have claimed that the two co-evolved and are necessarily interdependent. According to capitalist reason, it is obvious that you can’t have democracy without capitalism, and you can’t have capitalism without democracy.

This common sense is not entirely disconnected from the real world, but it is based on selective memory and a naïve overconfidence in our ability to know the future. Consider the following: even if it were true that capitalism and democracy have always gone together (and it is definitively not true), this would in no way justify the claim that they will go together until the end of time. Transhistorical claims originating in particular historical modes of production have never proven true, and there is no reason to expect end-of-history claims about the mutualism of capitalism and democracy are any more correct than previous prophecies.

More importantly, there is an overwhelmingly obvious rebuke to the claim that democracy and capitalism are mutually necessary: the contemporary Chinese political economy. Many analyzes of the Chinese experience, from all sides of the political spectrum, describe present-day China as “authoritarian capitalism.”21 If China is capitalist—and not only is it arguably capitalist, but as Slavoj Žižek loves to point out, it appears to be better at capitalism than anyone else—then the inevitability of the democracy-capitalism marriage clearly does not hold.22

The credibility of capitalism’s inherent democratic decency is further eroded by the fascisms that spread across Europe and other parts of the world in the mid-twentieth century. This is certainly no small matter: no account of Italy, Germany and Spain in that period can describe them as noncapitalist. Indeed, Germany’s remarkable performance during the 1930s, when much of the world was down and out, made fascism very appealing to many at the time, including a heck of a lot of capitalists—and, it must be said, quite a few workers too.23 Moreover, one cannot attribute the failures of fascism to its incommensurability with capitalism, as if it were a contradictory system never meant to be. Fascist Germany was a capitalist economic growth machine—cheerfully endorsed by both German capital and much of German labour—that was crushed, thankfully, by the war. However hateful the regime was, there is no evidence that fascist capitalism itself was doomed to failure on its own. Indeed, some have made the compelling argument that fascism helped save German, Italian, and Spanish capitalism in the 1920s and 1930s, by overcoming capital’s resistance to full employment, thus providing a “political” solution to a nominally “economic” collapse.24 When fascism fell, at least in Germany and Italy, it was not due to some flaw in its “variety” of capitalism; it was fascist leaders’ hubris, Allied bombing, and internal resistance that killed it. Indeed, Generalísimo Francisco Franco, whose victory over the Spanish Republicans in 1939 was partially funded by Texaco and other capitalist firms, peacefully “retired” from almost four decades of autocratic brutal-tyranny-in-capitalism in 1973, bequeathing Spain a degenerate constitutional monarchy and decades of political turmoil.

Add to this the unfolding history of developing-world dictatorships propped up by the US and western Europe over the years—none of which are easily classified as noncapitalist—and any claim that capitalism needs democracy is on shaky ground. It may be that liberal democracy needs capitalism, but it is definitely not the other way around. In fact, whatever anticapitalism’s prospects, the future of anything like democracy will depend very much on which of the terms dominates the capitalism-democracy pairing. Even if in the short term it seems democracy is tied to capitalism, there is clearly no necessary mutual dependence between the two. What is certain is that we can no longer leave democracy to the capitalists (see Chapter 8).

But that does not mean it is merely accidental that the two are so often paired. For Ingham, the origins of democracy lie in the political contradictions generated by the capitalist mode of production. The ideological fundamentals of liberal democracy—“universal” human rights, individual liberties, procedural consistency—were the same as those put forward by the proto-capitalist bourgeoisie in their effort to gain some freedom from the yoke of the state. When these classically “liberal” ideas became culturally dominant, they unsurprisingly trickled down from the elites to the workers and other noncapitalists, who mobilized those ideological tools in their own interests.

This is partly the story of how liberalism became hegemonic, and its plausibility depends on workers having at least some power to realize their interests. This means, despite many “radical” critiques, that the state is not simply a crude instrument of capitalist rule.25 For the power of liberalism to work as this account suggests, capital cannot entirely dominate and coordinate the state. The exercise of capitalist hegemony via the state must have some degree of popular legitimacy; the state must also hear the workers and the rest of the population. This would appear to be a reasonable characterization of the history of many states in Europe and the Americas where democracy appeared.