Re: Variations of the capitalist state

*Re: Variations of the capitalist state*

Anthony Boynton's framing is useful, and I want to concede most of it before saying where it turns.

Begin with his account of the English case. The problem of absolutism for the bourgeoisie, he writes, was that the monarch could pick and choose which capitalists the state would favor and then withdraw those privileges at will. That is not a stray observation. It is a definition of patrimonial rule, and it means his narrative treats the bourgeois revolution as the subordination of arbitrary personal favor to impersonal law and calculable administration. If that is what was accomplished, then the systematic return of favor-distribution as a mode of governing is an established phenomenon requiring vocabulary. It is the undoing of the specific achievement he has just described, and it requires a name.

Second, the claim is that the United States never needed Bonapartism because a limited Bonapartism is built into the Constitution. This argument mistakes the category. Bonapartism in the Eighteenth Brumaire is not a quantum of executive power inscribed in a founding document. It is a determinate relation among classes: a bourgeoisie that surrenders political rule to preserve social rule, a mass of atomized producers who must be represented because they cannot represent themselves, and a swollen apparatus that acquires a material interest of its own. Executive autonomy is the symptom, not the definition. If a strong elected executive were sufficient, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, and Roosevelt would all qualify, and the term would sort nothing. What distinguishes Lincoln's war powers or Roosevelt's emergency administration is that the autonomy was delegated by a bourgeoisie that retained the power to revoke it and was exercised through an apparatus staffed by career officials whose tenure did not depend on personal loyalty.

Third, and this is the substantive disagreement, Boynton supplies the premise and declines the conclusion. Capitalism has hit the wall; the factions cannot compose their differences, the legislatures deadlock, and each faction moves to capture the state for itself. That is the stalemate half of the Eighteenth Brumaire, and I accept it. But stalemate underdetermines form. It tells you the executive will float free of the contending fractions. It does not tell you how the freed executive reproduces itself once it is loose. The patrimonial specification answers that question: the apparatus is worked as a personal domain, offices are distributed as benefices, and discretionary instruments, pardon, tariff exemption, selective enforcement, licensing, procurement, and currency issue are used to build a following inside the state and a stratum of dependent capital outside it. Classical Bonapartism arbitrates among fractions in the general interest of capital as a whole. What is being built now does not arbitrate. It sorts capitals into clients and non-clients. That difference is a difference of form, and it has consequences for how the thing can be fought.

Fourth, I would resist the regression thesis. Boynton has these regimes working to resemble the precapitalist monarchies they replaced. They are not. The patrimonial content is generated by present conditions of accumulation, by the growing share of profit that depends on political discretion rather than on production; it is not inherited from anything. Weber's category is a diagnostic and an analogy, not a genealogy. Marx's remark about borrowing costumes from the dead applies with full force: the costume is old; the body wearing it was produced last week.

Fifth, a smaller point with consequences. Describing the English and Dutch states as precapitalist empires will not survive contact with Brenner. By the seventeenth century the English state's revenues already rested on capitalist ground rent and a countryside organized by market dependence. This is relevant for Boynton's argument rather than against it: the bourgeoisie was not capturing an alien apparatus but reorganizing one whose fiscal base was already its own. The transformation was political precisely because the social property relations had already moved.

The question I would put back to him is differentiation. If generalized deadlock is the cause, why do the outcomes diverge so sharply? Hungary, Russia, El Salvador, and the United States are not producing one regime type. The variable is the composition of the capital that depends on state discretion and the density of the institutions that once made discretion calculable. A theory of the state that stops at deadlock cannot register that variation. A theory of form can.

I look forward to the continuation.

--
Tony


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