The Dialectic of the State Form in the Post-capitalist Crisis and Transition. By: Dr. Oscar D. Rojas Silva

6/10/2024

The Dialectic of the State Form in the Post-capitalist Crisis and Transition. By: Dr. Oscar D. Rojas Silva

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Seven Theses on the Global Economic Status (EGG)

I.- The transformation of the MPK

According to a materialist vision of history, the Capitalist Mode of Production (MPK[1]) underwent a qualitative change in the transition to the twentieth century. Although the dominance of capitalist private property continues to be in force, two phases can be distinguished in the vector of competition: 1) the classical form, an MPK based on the free competition of capitalist units (MPK-LC) and 2) the transitional form, an MPK based on the annulment of competition derived from the advent of joint-stock companieswhich constitute oligopolies organized into cartels of production and exchange on the scale of the world market (MPK-SA).

The difference is that the MPK-LC operates under private capital while the MPK-SA does so under shared capital. This is what Marx (2015) points out as "the abolition [Aufhebung] of capital as private property within the limits of the capitalist mode of production itself" (p.562). This leap implied the expansion of the MPK-LC on a global scale through the development of the financial system, the time vector 1914-1944-1971 reflects the long geopolitical journey established by the United States' unilateral dominance through the monopoly of the world currency. Since it has been propped up by military force and the imposition of debt, the mode of production is converted from a simple joint-stock company into financial imperialism (MPK-IF).[2]

This implies not only the geopolitical arrangement between blocs and equilibrium forces, but also the geo-economic arrangement that orients the dominant channels of profit valorization to their next level: the capitalization of interest (i.e., the advent of the domination of capital at interest[3]). At this point it is necessary to remember that there is a leap between the use of money as credit and money as capital. Therefore, capitalism is not financialized [4] but simply that it has fulfilled its historical mission and what was once an abstraction today is presented as a real abstraction, it is the consummation of the capitalist telos.

II.- Differentiation between the political State and the economic State

Marxist analysis starts from a vision of totality via the analysis of the Historical Modes of Production (MPH) that constitute their evolutionary interconnection through the dialectic between Productive Forces (FP) and Social Relations of Production (PSR) whose tensions are derived from the coincidence (or not) between the two. Thus, the FP achieved by the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century pushed, first, to a world war and then to a renewal of the form of property through the use of the financial system. It is this tension that causes the need to distinguish between the political state and the economic state.

In this way, the institutionality produced at Bretton Woods constituted power links between states. The monopolization of the world currency generated the possibility of modulating the three constituent functions of the MPK: Commercial Capital (KC), Productive Capital (KP) and Monetary Capital (KD), giving hegemony to the latter. That is, the valuation of profit was subsumed under the capitalization of interest. The form of property underwent mutations since under this regime the capital in functions is divided between a management or financial aristocracy and the capitalist as owner.

The development of the financial system on a global scale is made up of the credit system (core), the payment system and the stock market, entities that constituted an economic state that seeks the capture of the debtor republics around the hegemonic country that, given its exceptionality, functions as a monarchy issuing money-credit. The central point for the discussion is to understand the dialectical relations in which a certain form is modified depending on the domain on which it is found. The analytical gap between the nation state and the global state has produced, from my point of view, the concealment of the corresponding modulator, given the FP achieved, of the node that allows the modification of the form of property when financial capital is dominant: the monetary standard[5].

III.- The form of ownership and its impact on the RSPs

The form of property should not be confused with its derived legal existence, but rather the economic form that generates a certain type of distribution, not only of the results of production but also of the means of production. Thus, a society based on private property will be qualitatively different from one based on social property. Different types of RSPs will be needed. The current problem has to do with the fact that capitalization allows a permanent flow of available social labor to the propertied classes, even without participating directly in the productive processes. Thus, the republics become zones of extraction of surplus value via debt.

In fact, the current geopolitical system in which the United States serves as the hegemonic pole, Europe and Japan as the semi-periphery and the rest of the world as subordinate countries, has its basis in the type of debt management that one has. While the United States can issue credit money, the semi-fair can benefit from this issuance, but it remains subject to the strategies imposed by the hegemonic country. The case of subordinate countries has the characteristics that their public budgets and industrial policies are intervened under the weight of creditors and their international rating systems.

These are the constraints that, for example, are often forgotten when making an assessment of the circumstances in which the 4T is unfolding.

IV.- The crisis of the dollar system and the emergence of new blocs

Currently the dollar system is experiencing its classic crisis, that is, the moment in which the FPs that operate in the development of money capital systematically clash with the stagnant RSPs expressed in the geopolitical equilibrium. The crisis of 2008 is the breaking point at which financial imperialism had to abandon the mythical horizon of a perpetual mechanism of profits. Like any crisis, the reality of the RSPs was shown in full light, in this case, junk or subprime loans showed something that Karl Polanyi had already witnessed since the crisis of 1929: the flimsy foundations on which capitalist rotation rests as a monetary economy.

Since 2008, a whole disturbance of the MPK-IF has been developing, since a new bloc called BRICS has emerged, which, having gone from being at first an aspirationist declaration, today has a real force that, like tectonic plates, the imminent clash has generated new civilizational frontiers, as is the case of the NATO versus BRICS proxy war on Ukrainian soil and the Palestinian genocide at the hands of a Zionist entity that seeks instability in a strategic place such as the Middle East. This is why de-dollarization is a central task.

V.- The Global Economic State and Limited Sovereignty

The Global Economic State (EEG) represents the global relationship that exists between nation states as real producers (domains of the KP). What the monopoly of the world currency has meant is, thanks to the interrelations of capitals around the competition for magnitudes of global social capital (KSG), an interdependence that inhibits nation states from exercising sovereignty in their economic policies. Countries depend on their internal contradictions, no doubt, but also on global relations of domination.

The paradigmatic case of the sudden flight of capital and the speculative movements of vulture capital exemplifies the coercion with which the world market imposes itself on the interests of any population on the planet. The dollar-based financial system also inhibits the possibility of direct relations between countries without the intermediation of the dominant pole.

This EEG, derived from its global scale, is barely recognizable by populations, this explains to a large extent how protests are usually unsuccessful if they are only directed against the political state in its particularity or if they enunciate capitalism as an abstraction that only exists in the idea and not in the concrete.

VI.- The search for a new monetary standard

The central point is that, despite the violence that is generated by a type of socialization, that is, the search for a new monetary standard points to a change in its design, not to a simple substitution of one currency for another, it is a matter of using FPs that allow the RSP to be modulated through a pattern that allows direct interaction between the different republics.

In other words, the capacity that remains latent is that of a socialization outside the constraints of the latest capitalist version, that is, the MPK-IF is transformed into a mode of social production that points towards the possibility of establishing relations between producers, but under free association. This frames the evolutionary horizon proposed by Marx as the economic form that results from capitalist metabolism: the Associated Free Producers (PLA). And, since this happens under a principle of socialization, we can enunciate the transition period as MPS-PLA. The K for capital is replaced by the S for social.

That is, the period from the 20th century to the 21st century, if we look at it from the perspective of capitalist development, it is about the MPK-IF, but if this process is observed from the hypothesis of the transition theory, it is about the construction of the MPS-PLA. The removal of the paper-based monetary standard has given way to a digital-based pattern. Its objective would be, as shown by blockchain technology, to dispense with the validation of a central bank to carry out direct exchanges. This would be the basis of the MPS-PLA.

VII.- Production of subjectivity and transition to MPC

This comparative analysis of interfaces entails, in turn, the need for reflection on the production of subjectivity, derived from the fact that the capitalist ideological system has managed to dissipate the intelligibility of its internal mechanisms and has eternalized its imaginary. Hence, in current discussions, capitalism is enunciated as if it were an eternal substance without processes of change.

Thus, in the contemporary left, and especially that which practices the fetish of purity, as Carlos Garrido puts it, they reduce all novelty in the mode of production, especially that of China, as if it were a capitulation of the communist revolution to the market (Garrido 2023). That is to say, the unnoticed social impulse that develops the dominance of money capital is hidden and closes the doors to the internationalism necessary to exercise the new geopolitics based on free and non-subordinate relations.

What is at stake is to consolidate the objective of economic metabolism, moving from a vision of accumulation to one based on the reproduction of life. In addition, it brings into view the critical horizon that currently haunts us: the metabolic rupture between the social and the natural. With this I want to point out that the PLAs move from the specifically social to the social-natural, that is, to the organic composition of the social as an expression of the natural, but also the new natural that arises from the social, that is, what I call: communitarian, while the illusory community transitions towards a real organic community once it internalizes the new FP achieved after MPK.

Once all this content returns to the vision of analysis, let's say that the content of the use values is recovered and the global vision is recovered as the construction of architectures, not for capitalization or valorization, but for the reproduction of the enrichment capacities of the social-natural experience. In this case, the end of accumulation is abandoned and, therefore, capitalism is overcome. Hence, the enunciation of this phase in which the metabolic breakdown is overcome can be called the community mode of production (CPM) based on associated free broodstock (RLA).

Notes

[1] I will always use K to refer to capital for the purpose of using a distinctive that allows a clear notation.

[2] Maurizio Lazzarato (2023) points out: "Globalization, halfway between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radically changes capitalism because, among other things, a new relationship between State and capital is established within it. The concept of imperialism perfectly captures this turning point: sovereign action, administrative action and military action are absolutely necessary in this new stage for the life and development of capital (as well as for the development of technology and science)" (p.68)

[3] In the theories of surplus value, Marx (1989) points out: "With capital at interest, this automatic fetish is perfected, the value that valorizes itself, the money that gives birth to money, without the scars of its origin being visible in this form. The social relation here acquires its finished manifestation, as the relation of a thing (money, commodity (to itself)." (p.404)

[4] It is worth making this distinction because in the standard discussion of the financial domain it has become common to think of speculation as a deviation from the productive when, as is known, exchange value is the absolute destination of capitalist accumulation.

[5] Karl Polanyi (2017) points out: "The breakdown of the international gold standard constituted the invisible link between the disintegration of the world economy that began during the transition to the twentieth century and the transformation of the entire civilization in the 1930s. Unless we realize the vital importance of this factor, it is not possible to see clearly either the mechanism that threw Europe into an inexorable disaster, or the circumstances that explain the astonishing fact that the forms and contents of a civilization rested on such precarious foundations" (p.82)

Bibliography

Garrido, C.L. (2023). The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism. Midwestern Marx Publishing Press. Dubuque.

Lazzarato, M. (2023). The imperialism of the dollar: crisis of US hegemony and revolutionary strategy. Lemon Ink. Buenos Aires.

Marx, K. (1989). Theories on Surplus Value III. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico

Marx, K. (2015). Capital: the global process of capitalist production. Volume III, vol. 7. Siglo veintiuno editores. Mexico.

Polanyi, K. (2017). The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mexico.

Author

Dr. Oscar D. Rojas Silva is a Professor of Political Economy at FES-Acatlán UNAM.