Nevertheless it is the view that is to be found in most modern academic Marxism. This view of the state claims to be based on the Communist Manifesto: ‘The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.’ But its origins do not lie in Marx himself so much as in the classical economists who preceded him: in the Communist Manifesto Marx simply takes their insistence on the need for a minimalist, ‘nightwatchman’ state and draws out its class character. The state may be a structure that developed historically to provide the political prerequisites for capitalist production-to protect capitalist property, to police the dealings of different members of the ruling class with each other, to provide certain services which are essential for the reproduction of the system, and to carry through such reforms as are necessary to make other sections of society accept capitalist rule-but it is not to be identified with the system itself. The state, by contrast, is a geographically based political entity, whose boundaries cut across the operations of the individual capitals. Capitalism, in this view, consists in the pursuit of profits by firms (or, more accurately speaking, the self expansion of capitals) without regard to where they are based geographically. The most common view of the capitalist state among Marxists is to see it simply as a superstructure, as external to the capitalist economic system. They have been the subject of an intermittent discussion among contributors to this journal for a decade and a half, and among the wider left there has been much greater confusion.1 These issues have created considerable debate on the left. on the prospects for successful economic restructuring in the USSR and Eastern Europe, on the repeated rows within the Tory government over European integration, on the significance of the United States’ war against Iraq. It is thrown up in a whole series of apparently different discussions: on the future for the Third World, on the relations between the superpowers in the aftermath of the Cold War. The relation between capital and the state is central to an understanding of developments in the world today.
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