Re: Variations of the capitalist state

*Re: Variations of the capitalist state*

Mark's post does what Boynton's did not, which is to name a mechanism on the accumulation side. I want to take it up before saying where I hold back.

Begin with the consistency problem, since it cuts against me if I ignore it. I told Boynton that deadlock underdetermines form. I have to say the same to Mark about exhaustion. The collapse of the neoliberal settlement is not an American event. France, Germany, Britain, Japan, and Canada are all working through the same exhaustion of the same arrangement, and none of them has produced anything resembling what is being built in Washington. If the explanans is general and the explanandum is particular, the explanans is not doing the work claimed for it. Exhaustion is the occasion. It is not the mechanism. Mark writes that the collapse of neoliberalism with no obvious replacement is "a driver behind" patrimonial Bonapartism, and in that formulation I agree with him, provided "driver" means "condition" rather than "cause."

Where his argument does real work is in the composition of the capital that is exhausting, and here I want to press it further than he does, because I think it strengthens the case.

A value-theoretic caveat first. Cannibalizing other sectors does not increase surplus value; it redistributes it. If the observation is that a rising share of profit now comes from redistribution rather than from production, that is not a footnote to the argument; it is the argument, and it is a stronger claim than Mark makes for it. Redistributed surplus has to be redistributed by some mechanism, and the mechanisms available to the tech sector are unusually political: spectrum, interconnection and power supply for data centers, export licensing for chips, federal procurement, antitrust forbearance, land and water and tax abatement at the state level, and now the whole emerging apparatus of compute and model policy. These are not market positions. They are grants. A capital whose rent is licensable is a capital that can be made a client, and a capital that can be made a client will behave like one. That is exactly the criterion I proposed: that the patrimonial content is generated by the growing share of profit dependent on political discretion. Mark has supplied the sectoral content. I take it as specification rather than rival.

On SSA theory and state form. Institutions in that tradition are stabilizers. They make accumulation calculable over a long stretch by fixing the terms of the capital-labor relation, intercapitalist competition, and the state's role. That is a real advantage over long-wave accounts for present purposes, since it puts institutions at the center rather than treating them as effects. But it also marks the limit. What is being assembled now is not a new social structure of accumulation, and it cannot become one, because discretionary distribution is not a structure. Its entire utility to the person distributing is that it remains revocable. A tariff exemption that becomes a rule stops buying loyalty. So I would put it this way: Patrimonial Bonapartism is the form the state takes when no accumulation structure can be assembled and the interregnum is administered by allocating conditions rather than generalizing them. That prediction is testable against the regime's own behavior. It should be systematically unable to convert its allocations into stable policy.

On the dress rehearsal. I would separate two things Bordiga got wrong. He was not insufficiently alarmed. He misidentified the form, treating fascism as a phase of bourgeois rule that would rotate back to the social democrats, and the strategic error followed from the misidentification. That is the lesson I take, and it argues for precision rather than for reaching. Mark concedes the decisive point himself when he writes that those behind Trump will need more of a mass base to continue. Fascism requires an autonomous mass movement with its own formations and a party that colonizes the state. Patrimonial rule works through personal loyalty and is threatened by an independent mass movement because a movement with its own cadre and its own program is exactly what cannot be held by benefices. The two forms are not sequential stages. The relevant danger is not that patrimonialism matures into fascism but that it makes fascism cheaper by destroying the institutions that make impersonal rule workable and leaving personal loyalty as the only coordinating principle still in operation.

To Michael's question about roads not taken. I would resist the counterfactual register, not because the history is uninteresting but because the question presupposes what is in dispute, that the state is an instrument available for programmatic reform independently of the class forces capable of imposing it. Ferguson and Rogers describe a party whose investor bloc changed. That is not a failure of nerve to be corrected by better policy design. And there is a sharper problem for the present. Reform requires calculable administration. A program needs a stable object to act on. Once discretion is the medium, the object moves, and the reform is undone the following week by an exemption. This is why I think the fight against patrimonial rule cannot be conducted as a defense of the pre-Trump administrative state. The liberal demand is the restoration of impersonality. Ours has to be a different form of accountability, one built from below: recall, binding mandate, the workers' wages, and delegates who can be removed by the people who elected them. Impersonal administration and personal domination are not the only two options, and treating them as such is how the opposition to this regime gets recruited into rebuilding the arrangement that produced it.

Which returns me to the question I left with Boynton and which nobody has yet taken up. Same crisis, divergent forms. What varies is the composition of the capital dependent on state discretion and the density of the institutions that once made discretion calculable. Mark has given us the first variable for the American case. I would like to hear the account of the second.

--
Tony


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