The Capitalist State and State Power

Marx planned a book on the state as part of his larger project to critique the political economy of the capitalist mode of production. Nonetheless Marx analyzed the state over some forty years of critical engagement with bourgeois society and provided at least seven types of analysis of the state and state power. Overall, he highlighted the significance of the institutional separation of the economic and political in capitalist social formations, explored the normal form of the capitalist type of state and some of its exceptional forms (notably Bonapartism), and related state power to specific state forms and the changing balance of forces. This article surveys the development of Marx’s work on the capitalist state, the range of approaches that he adopted in specific contexts, his form analysis of the state, his conjunctural analyses, and his eventual discovery of the adequate form of a democratic socialist state in the Paris Commune. It builds on this analysis of Marx’s work to comment on subsequent Marxist analyses of the state and state power, including capital-, class- and state-theoretical work and emphasizes the importance of a relational approach to the capitalist state.

European “Integration”

European integration has until recently suffered from relative neglect in Marxist research and analysis. Nevertheless, Mandel and Poulantzas made foundational contributions to Marxist theorization of European integration in the late 1960s and early 1970s: these have had a lasting influence of the rapidly emerging scholarship of the present. This entry provides a broad overview of Marxist analyses and debates about European integration while arguing that Poulantzas’s “interiorization thesis” has proven to be prescient and central for a critical understanding of the European Union.

Metabolic Rifts and the Ecological Crisis

In analyzing the relations between human societies and the larger biophysical world, Karl Marx employed a dialectical triadic scheme of “the universal metabolism of nature,” the “social metabolism,” and the metabolic rift. He incorporated this metabolic approach within his critique of political economy, allowing him to assess the historical interchanges and interpenetrations of society and ecological systems. Given its endless pursuit of accumulation, capitalism imposes its demands on nature, increasing pressures on ecological systems and the production of wastes. It generates distinct metabolic rifts (ruptures) in natural cycles and processes. Marx specifically developed this approach in his critique of capitalist agriculture, with regard to how this system created an ecological rift in the soil nutrient cycle. Contemporary scholarship has drawn upon this work to examine a broad array of ecological contradictions, which are culminating in an ecological crisis.

Geriatric Capitalism

This entry presents a variegated capitalism analysis of Atlantic capitalism. We trace the development of the national accumulation regimes in the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany from the nineteenth century to the present. Following the Great Depression and World War II, policymakers, reformers, and business leaders explicitly crafteda framework for regulating North American and Western European capitalism . The national Fordist accumulation regimes embedded in thisinternational framework offset the stagnationist and crisis tendencies of capitalism for around two decades, seeing high profits and strong, wage-led growth. The crisis of Fordism that lasted through the 1970s—declining profits and stagnation—marked the transition to what we refer to as the geriatric stage of post-Fordist Atlantic capitalism. In response to the crisis, capital and the state engaged in widespread restructuring. The post-Fordist regime of internationalized competition and finance generated a return to destructive, wage-based competition. The core-periphery nature of the enlarged, neoliberalized European Union and the precarious dependence of the United States on China have exacerbated global political economic instability. The post-Fordist stage is characterized by slow growth, economic instability, and increasingly damaging economic crises; wage stagnation, rising inequality, and labor market precarity; and political polarization.

The Eight Steps in Marx’s Dialectical Method

What one understands about dialectics often depends on the order in which it is presented. This article begins with the philosophy of internal relations, in which everything is conceived of in terms of relations and processes, and its accompanying process of abstraction, which enables us to focus on and separate out the part(s) of these relations and processes that are best suited for studying the problem(s) at hand. All the other steps Marx takes in his dialectical method, such as “dialectical laws,” “inquiry,” “self-clarification,” “exposition,” and “the identity of theory and practice” can only work as well as they do on the basis of these foundations.

The Enduring Relevance of Karl Marx

This chapter is the introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx. It demonstrates the continuing applicability of Marx’s concepts and theories to understanding twenty-first century capitalism, its crises, and the historical development of human society across varying modes of production. It presents an intellectual biography linking the major moments in Marx’s life to his ideas and theories. The biography also gives insight into Marx’s approach to research by focusing more closely on the method he outlined in the Grundrisse. It demonstrates, among other things, that Marx continually revised his ideas in light of new evidence or theoretical understanding. The chapter concludes with brief summaries of the handbook’s contributions, paying specific attention to the ongoing relevance of each chapter to societal concerns. While the introduction introduces the reader to the varied chapters in the handbook, it goes beyond mere summary to provide fresh insight into Marx’s life, work, and promise.

The Unresolved Agrarian Question in South Asia

This entry analyzes the historical evolution of the agrarian economy in South Asia and its present day predicament. Our focus is on the biggest country of the region, India. We start with a discussion of the Marixst theory of rent. Subsequently an agrarian economy dominated by petty peasants is examind through the lens of this theory. We probe the details of the South Asian agrarian economy which we argue is stuck in a state of lack of accumulation. We argue that asymmetry of market power in the agrarian produce market and state policies are the key factors in explaining why the agrarian question remains unresolved in South Asia.

Hegemony

This chapter explores Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, arguing that it is a theory of national-popular class politics aimed at illuminating how the achievement of state power and socioeconomic transformation can only be secured by mobilizing and winning the consent of the masses through a strategy of “national-popular” political and ideological alliance in civil society. Examined here are three essential aspects of the theory: the conditions of hegemonic struggle conceived as a dynamic field of “relations of force”; the apparatus of hegemony constituted by parties, states, civil society, and intellectuals; and the politics of hegemony involving a political and ideological campaign for mass consent among the “national-popular” masses. The chapter demonstrates how Gramsci’s concepts illuminate the success and failures of capitalist and socialist hegemonic strategies. The conclusion suggests that contemporary interpretations and applications of hegemony in social scientific research need to give greater weight to its holistic, class-based, and “national-popular” character.

Reproduction and Crisis in Capitalist Economies

An economic crisis in capitalism is a deep and prolonged interruption of the economy-wide circuit of capital. Crises emerge from within the logic of capitalism’s operation, and are manifestations of the inherently contradictory process of capital accumulation. The Marxist tradition conceptualizes two types of crisis tendencies in capitalism: a crisis of deficient surplus value and a crisis of excess surplus value. Two mechanisms that become important in crises of deficient surplus value are the rising organic composition of capital and the profit squeeze: two mechanisms that are salient in crises of excess surplus value are problems of insufficient aggregate demand and increased financial fragility. This chapter offers a synthetic and synoptic account of the Marxist literature on capitalist crisis.

Migration and the Mobility of Labor

The reduction of human beings into human commodities, or “human capital”—indeed, into labor and nothing but labor—which was the essence of modern slavery, served as a necessary predicate for the consolidation and perfecting of what Marx called “labor in the abstract.” This requires us to re-situate enslaved labor as the defining and constitutive limit for how we comprehend labor as such under capitalism. The production of labor in the abstract, or labor “in general,” depended furthermore upon concrete productions of sociopolitical difference, particularly the branding of race. Analogously, migration provides a key site for contemplating the mobility of labor “as such”—labor “in general,” or labor in the abstract—while simultaneously illustrating precisely how such mobility is inexorably subordinated through the production of spatialized/ racialized difference that arises through the enforcement of (“national”) state borders and immigration law, branding migrant labor as “foreign” if not “illegal.”