Doug Henwood wrote: An unregulated capitalist economy would quickly destroy itself. Capital needs the state to discipline and rescue it. The idea of bourgeois regulation is to preserve the system, not transform it, which was what M&E were all about.
This is basically correct in practice I think, but - if you keep deregulating and privatising in the neo-liberal fashion, then is the state ultimately able to regulate anything much, other than through military and security forces ? Many corporations today already have budgets and turnovers which are larger than the budgets and turnovers of medium-sized economies. This suggests that at some future date, other things remaining equal, governments could become "uneconomic", from the corporate viewpoint, since it is cheaper to protect your own assets with your own security forces, as happened with trading houses in the epoch of merchant capital within late-feudal and early-bourgeois society. In Europe, the so-called bourgeois revolutions were strongly inspired by the desire of the urban burghers to gain more control over taxation and the spending of tax revenue, as well as the desire for the unification of a national market. If you now actually look at state operations in the 18th or 19th century, there is absolutely no comparison with the scale of state activities today, i.e. the amount of regulation and state budget money that exists today in developed economies never existed in the past. In part, this is due simply to increases in population size and complexity, but in part it is due to a crisis of capitalist social relations. But in underdeveloped economies regulation is very much less. Marx himself suggests in the Grundrisse that the general tendency of capital accumulation is ultimately to eliminate the bourgeois state, presumably because corporate organisational principles supplant state-integrative principles through privatisation. Thus, it is possible to conceive of a world dominated by very large corporations or trading houses, who mutually agree on different territories and have their own security forces to protect their own capital, with a large number of sub-contractors providing services and inputs which would be uneconomic for the corporations to produce themselves. Today this is still science fiction, but all the signs are there, socially and technically. I am saying this only because I think the problem should be conceived in terms of the organisational and integrative principles which can sustain and facilitate the process of capital accumulation on a world scale. Whether that will happen is another story, that depends on the success of various modes of social integration. J.
