Towards an Open and Political Marxist theory of the state: Levelling Simon Clarke’s ‘rule of money’ and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s ‘market imperative’

The state became once again a central question in Marxist studies. This interest displays a specific engagement with the state as explanandum – as a phenomenon to be explained in itself – in contrast to an interest in the state simply as explanans , or in terms of its role and functions within neoliberal capitalism. This might be due to the urgent concern to understand whether there are any class limits to the extraordinary and radical political transformations taking place all over the world, turned upside down by Trumpism. To start problematizing the state question via proper Marxist analytical tools, this article critically revisits the differing approaches of Simon Clarke and Ellen Meiksins Wood, the prominent figures of Open Marxism and Political Marxism, respectively, to state-class relations. It identifies functionalist resolutions in Wood’s comprehension of the state within global capitalism, ultimately weakening the analytical power of her conceptions of market imperative and the detachment of the economic sphere from the political sphere. After underlining the importance of Clarke’s argument that capitalist class rule and the state need to be approached at different levels of abstraction, the article ultimately proposes that historicizing the ongoing transformations in the making in the political form of the capitalist state requires utilizing Clarke’s conception of ‘the rule of money’ and Wood’s conception of ‘the market imperative’ at the same level of abstraction. For, this is the level at which the global class constitution of both the state and civil society by capitalist relations of production can be problematised.