THE STATE AND CAPITALISM

...Certainly, if the frame of reference were not the accumulation of capital but the development of functional or rational individuals in the sense of versatile or educated men and women, the mode of economizing accepted by the existing order would not pass muster...

...One was the long and tortuous achievement of political rights for the bourgeoisie...

...Take, for instance, the techno-economic structure...

...Thus it is not the free contention of realms that holds the essence of capitalism, as I Bell, Cultural Contradictions, p. 11...

...The question is this: If the realms coexist in an unordered, equivalent manner, how shall we distinguish the trials and tribulations of modern capitalism from those of other societies in the throes of their contradictions...

...There have been critical moments in the history of capitalism, as in the history of other societies, when decisive blows have descended from unexpected actors, ideas, interests, or accidents...

...This was the state's gradual loss of its rights of direct access to surplus...

...By utilizing its power to the hilt, for example, it might be possible for the state to depress wages dramatically, thereby assisting the accumulation of capital...

...This did not run its course until the late 18th century, when the full foundation was laid for a regime of capital—namely, the recognition of clear "constitutional" constraints on the power of the state to violate the private space of the individual or to commandeer his or her property...

...On the land, surplus continued to be gathered through the lord's political domination over the serf, but in the towns and cities, surplus more and more welled up in the form of profits accruing to merchant traders, later in merchant guilds...

...Copyright 1985 by Robert Heilbroner...

...Bell, Cultural Contradictions, pp...

...Let me instance this difficulty in a work in which I find much to admire, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism by Daniel Be11.2 Bell here avoids defining the concept of capitalism despite its prominence in the title of his work...

...It is the discordances between these realms which are responsible for the various contradictions within society.' Bell's focus on distinct economic, political, and cultural realms would seem to bring his analysis close to mine...

...At a crucial point in the 17th and 18th centuries this public realm also assumed a command function to force modernization upon the still timid economic sphere—Colbert and Frederick the Great are exemplars of this early dirigisme...

...What prevents these activities from constituting a "realm" is the absence of any formal boundaries that exclude the exercise of state power over the organization or direction of production or distribution...

...The older form of domination still "contains" the newer form, but imperfectly and uneasily...

...Participation or representation in which processes...

...Thus even though the state retained the ultimate weaponry of rule and the authority of awe, it became dependent on the operation of its self-created republic for the nourishment of revenues...

...In insisting on the pervasive importance of identifying historically specific cores within social formations, I am very much aware of the pitfalls of reductionism...

...From this perspective it is a matter of course that capital, as the dominating principle of the society identified by its presence, must color and infiltrate the institutions and beliefs that lie beyond its immediate ambit of operation...

...Of course, the physical and social undertakings necessary for material survival are visible in all societies, as are also the technical and organizational problems of altering or channeling these undertakings...

...xiv—xv...

...As we know, this momentous internal secession was the consequence of the political fragmentation that followed the collapse of the Roman empire...

...See also his The Winding Passage (Cambridge, Mass.: Abt Books, 1980), pp...

...Thus the warlord collecting his tribute, part of which will be conveyed to the imperium, is at one and the same time manifesting a political relationship of domination and obedience, and carrying out an economic function of surplus collection and distribution...

...but the full force of state power is normally held back by consideration of bourgeois morality itself, or simply by the calculations of prudence...

...ples, so that society does indeed take on the appearance of a Chinese puzzle without a decisive structural element...

...From the viewpoint of the formation of two realms of society, we see with increasing clarity the appearance of two interdependent and yet rivalrous structures within this extended period...

...in tributary societies it is the principle of centralized rulership with its associated aristocratic or priestly hierarchies...

...Bell, Cultural Contradictions, p. 10 (his italics...

...Out of this unstable milieu—there were some 500 more or less autonomous political units in Europe in 1500—there emerged the cluster of strong military-administrative units that would reduce the political crazy-quilt to a mere 25 members by the year 1900.7 The mercantile world itself, it should be noted, experienced the same unifying pressures that brought about the forced agglomeration of petty fiefdoms into kingdoms, so that the petty merchantdoms of the 12th century grew by the 15th century into the vast operations of the Bardi and Peruzzi and Medici and the merchant bankers of Augsburg, then into the East India Companies, the Turkey Company, and the global commercial operations of the 18th century...

...that is, rooted in the organization of labor and in the wrenching of surplus from labor's product—but equally or more frequently they arose from political or cultural crises, such as breakdowns in political succession or religious convulsions...

...To the economic sphere itself, without any formal recognition of the fact, was consigned the task of superintending the daily work of the population and of amassing the surplus of which the state itself was a main beneficiary...

...441 The emergence of an autonomous economic realm had two aspects...

...Contemporary society is not spared these ancient sources of disruption, but it bears within itself the seeds of another kind of endemic economic crisis for which no parallel can be discerned in prior social entities...

...Thus it seems to me that the failure to accord centrality to one principle and its embodying institutions—not, of course, the same ones for all social formations—robs social analysis of its clarificatory potential as gravely as the dogmatic insistence that all attributes of 439 any given society can be explained as mere epiphenomena of its mode of production or of any other organizing structure...

...1 2 Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976...

...The "self" conceived as what manner of being...

...Such a view is perfectly compatible with the obvious fact that the hand of the state, although generally exercised on behalf of the regime of capital, is also stayed by notions of fairness and justice as well as political expediency...

...Even then, the milieu into which these blows descend, whatever their explosive power, is not a drama of Pirandello-like characters in search of identities and meanings, but a society engaged in and enthralled by the nature and consequent logic of its organizing principle...

...In the same fashion, the peasant making his rental payments or taking part in a corvee is simultaneously evidencing the relationship of explicit obedience on which the polity is founded and producing the subsistence and surplus on which it lives...

...The state that carries on the formal tasks of government, or the ideational structures that contain and convey its world views, could no more escape being recognizable as "capitalist" than could the governing institutions or the ideational creations of earlier formations escape being identifiable as belonging to tributary or feudal forms of historical society...

...In similar fashion, we discover that the principles described by Bell as "axial" in other spheres also beg the question of the referential point...

...Samir Amin has coined the term "incomplete tributary societies" to describe feudalism...

...But this familiar story of political gain was matched by a less familiar one of economic loss...

...He writes...

...The power to tax may be the power to destroy, but the ability to tax presupposes the existence of a working economy...

...In modern society the axial principle is functional rationality, and the regulative mode is economizing...

...Thus even before capitalism emerged in full dress, the appearance of a world of business presaged its entrance within late feudal Europe...

...There is, however, a sharp difference...

...I repeat that domination is not rigid determination...

...More precisely, nothing like an economic "realm" can be discovered in any of them...

...7 Cited in Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1981), p. 187...

...What is important is that the exercise of power, whether expressed by a single ruler or a state bureaucracy, combines the enforcement of political relations of suband superordination with the economic performance of various tasks...

...Were not the conflicts and contradictions among those realms decisive in changing, perhaps even in destroying, these societies...

...Instead he describes "modern society" as the product of a "disjunction" of realms, none of which clearly dominates the whole...

...The answer—and I think it one with which Bell would agree—is that the contradictions of capitalism somehow arise from the nature and logic of the system—that is, from the unfolding of a society under the peculiar stresses and strains generated by its historically unique search for generalized surplus...

...12, 13...

...see it, but their tense containment within a set of economic imperatives...

...I find it more useful to think of contemporary society . . . as three distinct realms, each of which is obedient to a different axial principle...

...Is this not the principle that sets the limits to "practical" politics, draws the line as to the agenda of national discussion, and validates the prevailing commercial tone of culture...

...In the political realm Bell designates "legitimacy" and "representation or participation" as the crucial validating concepts...

...We have already referred to the familiar fact that no clear-cut division exists between economic and political activities in precapitalist orders...

...First, however, we must look more carefully into the properties of the economic and political spheres themselves, in particular those that comprise the productive and distributive activities of the social formation, and those that define the realm charged with governance...

...Did not the Roman empire or late feudalism or Ming China have their techno-economic structures, their polities, and their cultures, each with its axial principle...

...In our own case, unless we place the regime of capital at the center of the stage, where it dominates the play, there is no "capitalism" whose cultural contradictions have any special character...

...It is hardly surprising, under these circumstances, that a tension between the remaining apparatus of state domination and the new structure of economic domination lies at the very heart of capitalism, vastly complicating the task of defining the relationship of state and economy...

...Under capitalism what criteria of "functional rationality" determine the "economizing" of labor, other than the maximization of profit...

...Beginning as early as the 10th century, the mercantile estate found the productive shelter it needed in the rubble of fiefdoms that emerged from that enormous collapse...

...There is no essential difference between the disciplining or the marshaling of a labor force and an army, although the former generally requires less effort because it can rely on the inertia of tradition...

...What seems fatally missing from the analysis is that all of these questions are normally answered within "contemporary society" in ways that are defined by, or at least compatible with, the regime of capital...

...Rather, the sense of a historical reference point implicit in such a central placement gets us around the difficulties that arise from a failure to assign any hierarchy of importance to princiThis is an excerpt from The Nature and Logic of Capitalism by Robert Heilbroner...

...I will return to the question of the permeation of the principle of capital into the other realms of its regime...

...and in capitalism it is capital with its self-expanding attributes...

...This unique kind of crisis does not arise from a general disjunction of realms but from the specific tendencies of capital itself, the distinctive aspect of the society whose nature we are trying to understand...

...It is for this reason that the regime of capital is the dominant, active influence in the normal relationship between the two realms, and it is why the state is normally its obliging servant...

...To be published this fall by W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., and reprinted here with the kind permission of the publishers...

...I place the word in quotation marks because in many of these early systems even this aspect of domination has not acquired a distinctive association with "the state" and its apparatus, as opposed to the mere expression of 440 a single ruler's will...

...In primitive societies that organizing principle is kinship with its networks of reciprocity...

...Very gradually, there arose from the widening importance of mercantile dealings, and from the increasing dependence of all levels of society on the market mechanism, the foundations of a regime of capital itself...

...6 The term suggests that the logic of feudalism was to remedy its incompletion by seeking self-sufficiency through military and dynastic struggles and alliances...

...It is therefore not only possible, but necessary, to accord to the political and ideological realms a degree of freedom to act on behalf of motives that antedate those of capital accumulation and that persist alongside it, although generally subordinated to it...

...Selfinterest, not weakness, drives the state to support and advance the accumulation of capital...

...I divide society, analytically, into the technoeconomic structure, the polity, and the culture...

...A second objection to the multiaxial principle brings us to examine the purpose for which it was originally intended—namely, to provide an explanation of the corrosive, possibly fatal "contradictions" of contemporary society...

...As Bell describes See E. P Thompson, The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), chap...

...The influence of the economic realm on its intertwined political and social realms does not therefore involve any mechanical dependency or slavish passivity of the latter but only their congruence with, and complementarity to, the operating relationships of capital...

...Surely, the answer can only be given by reference to some other underlying principle of the society...

...See Samir Amin, Class and Nation (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980...

...In the realm of culture it is the "expression and remaking of the 'self in order to achieve selfrealization and fulfillment...

...WHAT WE FIND in capitalism, then, is a new form of regime in which the central organizing economic structure is divorced from the direct access to the means of violence that has always been the prerogative of the state...

...This reflects, at the level of national power, the absence of direct coercion that is also characteristic of capital's power at the work surface of society...

...and the newer form imbues the older one with its historic mission and purpose—the accumulation of private wealth—but only partially and subject to exception...

...One of these structures retained the ancient trappings and much of the military power of the original imperium and was vested with the formal responsibility of enforcing the will of the state, both through its monopoly of legal violence and its position of moral authority...

...As a consequence, in all tributary systems there is but one realm, that of the "political" order...

...Save in unusual circumstances, the state lost its command over the labor or materials, or even the money, by which it traditionally assembled its secular, religious, or military might...

...they follow different norms which legitimate different, and even contrasting, types of behavior...

...These are not congruent with one another and have different rhythms of change...

...These dangers, mordantly described by E. P Thompson, derive from a mechanical conception of social relations in which rigid determinations force all elements in society to respond in mechanical fashion to changes in the foundational structure.' This impoverishment of social analysis is by no means an unavoidable consequence of the central placement of a given set of institutions with their attendant belief systems...

...Guildsmen who constituted briefly a kind of open society of independent producers in the 12th century were the rich masters of many trades, and, by the 16th century, the dominant group in all cities...

...The economic domain is simply of one piece with the political...

...4 But what is functional rationality...

...In capitalism as in other regimes, a central organizing principle and its institutions influence all aspects of the social formation, whether these be concerned with material life, justice and social order, or custom and belief...

...This principle of de jure equality, with its closely associated right of "private" property, formed the basis of the liberal polity...

...It was also this general exclusion of state power from the workings of the marketplace and from the accumulation process that prevented the state—and still prevents it—from being able to control, other than superficially, the competitive pressures resulting from the mutual encroachment of capitals...

...It is but a slight exaggeration, if any at all, to claim that there is no activity that results in the production or the allocation of material wealth that is not also the embodiment of the hierarchical principle of the system...

...For an economic realm to emerge, that pervasive and unchallenged rulership must yield up some portion of its sovereignty, recognizing, so to speak, the existence of an autonomous republic of commerce and production within its own territory (and even stretching beyond it...

...If that is granted, in what way are the contradictions of modern society different from those of previous ones...

...The boundaries of the terms legitimacy, representation and participation, and self-expression are conventionally decided in political life by the necessity to preserve the critical wage-labor institution and to continue the generation of surplus for surplus's sake...

...What is needed is no more—and, of greater importance, no less —than a recognition of the existence of general priorities and interests without which no social formation has any historical center of gravity...

...438 it, this realm "frames the occupation and stratification system of the society and involves the use of technology for instrumental ends...

...5 But as with the techno-economic sphere, these descriptions leave unasked the crucial questions: Legitimacy of what...

...To put it somewhat differently, the crucial relationship of domination in tributary systems is applied alike with regard to the allocation of labor or the administration of justice, to the extraction of rents or the inflicting of punishment...

...The contradictions of other societies arose from different sources—sometimes economic...