Re: Variations of the capitalist state

> On Aug 17, 2026, at 21:43, Anthony Teso via groups.io <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> 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.

I think so, too.
> 
> 
> 

...

> Fifth, a smaller point with consequences. Describing the English and Dutch states as precapitalist empires will not survive contact with Brenner.

For those who need references, like I do, see http://gesd.free.fr/brenner76.pdf and https://dokumen.pub/the-transition-from-feudalism-to-capitalism-0860917010-9780860917014.html


> 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 changes in 16th and 17th century England that produced capitalist social relations raises the question of what's shaping US capitalism in 21st Century United States. Tony B mentioned that "capitalism has hit the wall..." Capitalism does that periodically.

This periodicity has been studied in the theory of long waves by Mandel, who describes the process in terms of exogenous triggers and endogenous processes, which echo some of the discussion of this thread as well as the Dobb-Sweezy debate generations ago. Mandel's long waves are based on value theory. Another theory, the Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA), which focuses on institutional factors.

The post WWII rebuilding of a devastated Europe and Asia fueled a long wave of capitalist prosperity in the US that lifted capitalist markets around the world. The institutions of this surge in value accumulation were shaped by US capital's alliance with its industrial working class. The partnership lasted roughly a quarter century. During this time, the US policed the world and allocated enormous sums to support military spending on a scale never seen in "peacetime" - though 8-10M people died in foreign countries as a result of the US military and its foreign policy in the post WWII period. Domestically, however, US political and social institutions became progressive during this period with concessions made for social peace including the US Black Civil Rights, women's rights, environmental protections, and other concessions. 

The alliance broke apart after 1970 when the long wave continued under different institutional arrangements: US capital and its agents, such as Justice Louis Powell, struck a belligerent posture to the social and environmental justice movements and labor unions. Capital no longer needed a partnership with the US working class now that US industries were competing with a rebuilt capitalist Europe and Asia. US capitalists went looking for surplus value in the working classes of far less developed countries where workers lived in dormitories and shipping crates rather than ranch houses and bungalows. Many label this the "neoliberal" era, which lasted nearly a half century.

Today, neoliberalism cannot sustain the post WWII long wave. Instead, US institutions are in crisis and neoliberal ideologies no longer hold sway over large parts over the US voting population. Most importantly, finance capital shorted US industry during the neoliberal period, deficits rose, and the surplus shrank over time. Most recently, about 75% of stock market gains spring from the tech sector, which is predatory capital investment that increases surplus by cannibalizing other sectors and eliminating jobs in other industries. The US technology industry has always displaced jobs, but since the turn of the century, tech has replaced entire industries and incorporated them into its businesses. Tech capitalists are key backers of Trump.

Unlike the 1970s, US capitalists no longer have the room to maneuver by changing institutional arrangements. The US industrial base has been cannibalized. What's left to consume is being eaten by Tech, which is facing increased popular opposition, such as the anti-datacenter movements today. The reasons for the collapse of neoliberalism with no obvious replacement is a driver behind Tony's Patrimonial Bonapartism. It is, of course, overdetermined and also shaped by US demographic shifts, and changes in sexual and gender roles, among other factors. I don't expect this current period to outlast Trump, and I do expect that those behind Trump will need more of a mass base to continue what they have started. Today's Trump administration is not fascist, but it may be a dress rehearsal for a future US fascist movement.

I have been reading Gramsci's Prison Notebooks lately. Hoare and Nowell-Smith's introductory essay is particularly interesting in its description of the Italian communists and left socialists sense-making of the emergence of Italian fascism. The lion of the Italian revolutionary left, Amadeo Bordiga viewed Italian fascism as a phase of rule that will give way to social democrats in office. Gramsci was arrested because he did not choose to leave the country when the fascist crackdown was underway in earnest; he didn't think a good captain should abandon his ship. Or in Gramsci's case, that an elected legislator should not abandon his post at such a critical time. Their confusions were an ominous warning to us all.

Mark




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