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John Maynard Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State*

1929 as a fundamental moment for a periodization of the modern state

Fifty years have passed since the events of Red October 1917. Those events were the climax of a historical movement that began with the June 1848 insurrection on the streets of Paris, when the modern industrial proletariat first discovered its class autonomy, its own, independent antagonism to the capitalist system. A further decisive turning point was, again, in Paris: it was the Commune of 1871, whose defeat led to the generalization of the idea of the party and to awareness of the need to organize class autonomy politically.

The intervals 1848 to 1871, then 1871 to 1917: this periodization seems to provide the only adequate framework for a theorization of the contemporary state. A definition of today's state has to take into account the total change in relations of class power that was revealed in the revolutionary crises that spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century. The problem imposed on political thought and action by the class challenge of 1848 led to a new critical awareness, to some extent confused, of the central role now assumed by the working class in the capitalist system. Unless we grasp this class determinant behind the transformation of capital and the state, we remain trapped within bourgeois theory; we end up with a formalized sphere of 'politics', separated from capital as a dynamic class relation. We must go beyond banal descriptions of the process of industrialization; our starting point is the identification of a secular phase of capitalist development in which the dialectic of exploitation (the inherent subordination and antagonism of the wage-work relation) was socialized - a process that led to its extension over the entire fabric of political and institutional relations in the modern state. Any definition of the contemporary state that does not encompass these understandings is like Hegel's dark night in which all cows appear grey.

The year 1917 is a crucial point of rupture in the process: at that point, history became contemporary. The truth already demonstrated in 1848 - the possibility that the working class would appear as an independent variable in the process of capitalist development, even to the extent of imposing its own political autonomy - now achieved full realization, Hegel's Durchbruch ins Freie ['breakthrough into freedom']. The land of the Soviets was the place where working-class antagonism had been structured in the independent form of a state. As such, it became a focus of internal political identification for the working class internationally, because it was a present, immediately real, objective class possibility.

At that point socialism took a step from utopia into reality. From then on, theories of the state would have to take into account more than just the problems involved in the further socialization of exploitation. They would have to come to terms with a working class that had achieved political identity and had become a historical protagonist in its own right. The state would now have to face the subversive potential of a whole series of class movements, which in their material content already carried revolutionary overtones. This means that the enormous political potential of this first leap into working-class world revolution was internalized within the given composition of the class. At every level of capitalist organization there was now a deeper, more threatening and contradictory presence of the working class, which was now autonomous and politically consistent. In this respect, the originality of 1917, the unique character of the challenge it presented by comparison to preceding cycles of working-class struggle, towers supreme. From there on, all problems acquired new perspectives and an entirely new dimension; the working-class viewpoint could now find its full independent expression.

Of course, the capitalist class became aware of the real impact of the October Revolution only slowly. At first the movement was seen essentially as an external fact. The initial response was an attempt, successful to a varying degree, to externalize the danger, to isolate the Soviet republic militarily and diplomatically, and to turn the revolution into a foreign issue. Then there was the internal threat. What was the general response of capital to the international wave of workers' struggles in the period that immediately followed - I mean to the creation of powerful new mass trade unions and to the explosion of the factory council movement, which competed for control over production?1 During this period, only backward, immature ruling classes responded with fascist repression. But the more general response, which was to reproduce reformist models of containment, only scratched the surface of the new political reality. The overall goal of capital in the period that followed was to defeat the working-class vanguard or, more specifically, to undermine the material basis of their leadership throughout this phase - that is, a class composition that featured a relatively highly 'professionalized' sector (typically, engineering), which came with an ideology of self-management as its corollary. The primary objective, then, was to destroy the basis of an alliance between workers' vanguards and proletarian masses - the very alliance on which Bolshevik organization was premised. To cut the vanguard off from the factory and the factory from the class, to eradicate the party from within the class: this was the aim of capitalist reorganization, the specific form of counterattack against 1917 in the West.

Taylorism, the Fordist revolution in production, and the new 'American way' of organizing work had precisely this function: to isolate the Bolshevik vanguards from the class and to rob them of their hegemonic role in production through the massification of the productive process and the deskilling of the labour force. This in turn accelerated the injection into production of new proletarian forces that broke the striking power of the old working-class aristocracies, neutralized their political potential, and prevented their regroupment. Earlier, in the mid-nineteenth century, capital had attempted to break the nascent proletarian front with the help of a new industrial structure that fostered the creation of labour aristocracies. Similarly after 1917, the working class had achieved political recomposition, in the wake of that breaking point in the cycle, capital once again turned to technological means of repression. As always, technological attack - increases in the organic composition of new sectors, assembly lines flow production, scientific organization of work, subdivision and fragmentation of jobs, and so on - was capital's first and almost instinctive response to the rigidity of the existing class composition and to the threat it engendered to capitalist control.

But the qualitatively new situation after 1917 imposed limits precisely here. The possibilities for the recomposition of the labour force in the phase of post-war reconversion certainly existed in the short run. But the capitalist class soon realized that this reorganization would open up an even more threatening situation in the long term. Not only would capital have to contend with the enlarged reproduction of the class that these changes would inevitably bring about; it would have to face its immediate political recomposition too, and at a higher level of massification and socialization of the workforce. The October Revolution had introduced once and for all a political quality of subversion into the material needs and struggles of the working class, a spectre that could not be exorcized. Given this new situation, the technological solution would backfire in the end. It would only relaunch the political recomposition of the class at a higher level. At the same time, this response or counterattack was not sufficient for confronting the real problem that faced capital, namely how to recognize the political emergence of the working class while finding new means, through a complete restructuration of the social mechanism for the extraction of relative surplus value, of controlling this new class politically within the limits of the system. Conceding working class autonomy had to be accompanied by an ability to control it politically. The recognition of the originality of 1917, of the fact that the entire existing material structure of capital had been thrown out of gear and that there was no turning back, would sooner or later become a political necessity for capital.

The day of reckoning was not long in coming. As always, capital's political initiative has to be forced to free itself. Soon after the defeat of the General Strike in Britain - the event that seemed to mark the outer limit of the expanding post-war revolutionary process - the spectre of 1917 returned in a new and more threatening guise. The collapse after 1929 was all the more critical as a result of this looming threat. Capitalism now confronted a working class that had been socially levelled by the repression exerted against it, had become massified to a point where its autonomy needed recognition, and had to be both acknowledged in its subversive potential and grasped as the decisive element and motive power behind any future model of development. The great post-1929 crisis was a moment of truth, a rebounding upon capital's structure of the previous technological attack on the working class, and the proof of...