The capitalist state in Open Marxism: Primitive accumulation, historical specificity, and social form

This article examines the relationship between the capitalist form of the state and the impersonal domination of capital. The critique of capital, as it is articulated in both the Open Marxist and Political Marxist traditions, highlights the importance of apprehending capitalist society’s essential determinations as historically specific forms. In Open Marxism, the capitalist state is understood as the political form of appearance of a society constituted through antagonism. Developing this view, this article argues that part of the reproduction of capital accumulation—and hence of capitalist society—consists in state intervention to reproduce the availability of labour-power by maintaining the dispossession or the double freedom of those owning nothing but their labour-power. Whereas this was accomplished through direct violence and coercion during primitive accumulation, its persistence in consolidated capitalist social relations is impersonal, objectified, and pervasive. It is the form of value, not of the state, that is the cause of workers’ compulsion to sell their labour-power. Nevertheless, struggles over the reproduction of dispossession—which is a presupposition of labour-power as a commodity, and hence of the capital relation—prompt the intervention, coercion, and violence of the capitalist state.