1) On the question of the general definition of the state
Territory, state power, and population are commonly regarded as important components of the sovereign nation-state in modern international law theory. In the Marxist theoretical tradition inspired by structuralism, Nicos Poulantzas, following and contrasting with Louis Althusser’s analyses of ideological state apparatuses (Althusser 1977), has described the state somewhat more elaborately as the “material condensation of a relationship of forces between classes and class fractions, which is always expressed in specific form in the state” (Poulantzas 1978:119). In this definition, the primacy is given to class struggles, social power relations and their transformations, and finally the positions of social agents within the framework of the organization and reproduction of production relations, which for Poulantzas are characterized in particular by the separation of intellectual and manual labor. It can be said very briefly that in his theory of the state, Poulantzas examines the complex interplay between the division of labor materialized in the relations of production and the state within a concrete social formation, which is constituted in the last instance by social forces and power relations. Precisely because of its relative separation from the economy, the state, as the ensemble of ideological, repressive, and economic state apparatuses, can provide the conditions that enable ruling classes and class factions to constitute themselves as a “bloc in power,” within which one or more factions succeed in presenting particular interests as general and hegemonic interests. (Ibid: 239)
Thus, in line with Pierre Bourdieu’s analyses of the state (Bourdieu 2014), at least in terms of thrust, Poulantzas seeks to reject functionalist conceptions of the state that define the state purely in terms of its functions by conceptualizing the functions themselves as contested state fields. Poulantzas distinguishes himself, first, from juridical conceptions of the state that describe the state in terms of law (sovereignty, territory, constitution, separation of powers, juridical property, etc.), second, from instrumentalist conceptions of the state. ); second, instrumentalist positions, which conceive of the state either as a neutral tool or as an instrument of the economically ruling classes; third, economist views, which regard the state as an expression or purely as a transmission mechanism of economic regularities; and fourth, form-analytic theories, which derive the state from the capitalist sphere of circulation or, as the case may be, from the formal freedom and equality of the state. from the market mechanisms guaranteeing formal freedom and equality (actors concluding contracts) or from capital structures, in order to emphasize the cohesive function of the state for the economy, while in the process, according to Poulantzas at least, the class struggles and power relations would be subordinated or understood as purely contingent.
Poulantzas describes the foundation of power relations in the state apparatuses with the concept of compression, which for him indicates that power relations are permeated by hierarchical divisions (of social forces) that solidify in specific discursive-material arrangements and thus inscribe themselves in the state apparatuses. For Poulantzas, the apparatus that materializes the consolidation of the power relation is based on a specific aggregation, institutionalization, and bundling of material practices. These practices traverse all state spheres, that is, they take place in and between the various state apparatuses, giving them a specific density and relevance, which means nothing more than that the practices, which either stand in opposition to each other or are blended into compromises, must find very specific material arrangements in the state. This means that the configuration of state apparatuses has material structural principles, be they mechanisms of “structural selectivity” (Offe 1975: 65f.) that block access to the apparatuses for the underclasses, bureaucratic administrative logics such as “priority determination,” which is evident in the organizational structure and weighting of the various state apparatuses, and finally the “filtration” of interests (various policy options are available, but only certain policies are implemented). (Poulantzas 1978: 165f.) Depending on given problems, whole complexes of measures are set in motion, which today, however, are much less conflictual than Poulantzas still assumed, but remain within the problem horizon of a technocratic elite, proving once again that the state is not a neutral terrain equally accessible to all social forces. Thus, far from being a neutral arrangement, the state is far more receptive to capital interests than to workers’ interests, and this kind of relationality must be permanently reproduced in the state.
“Material compression” is a specific concept intended to ground the constitution, reproduction, and transformation of the capitalist state in its materiality. Furthermore, it serves to grasp the state as a strategic process and to relate state power to the power relations and strategies of social forces and classes, in order to then analyze precisely how the processes of the constitution of state power take place, from which interests social forces and classes (starting from their position in the social division of labor) employ political strategies and tactics vis-à-vis other forces by means of certain power techniques, how these processes are inscribed in the structures and policies of apparatuses and in the unity of the state, and what effects this has on the structure and forms of practice within the power bloc, on relations between the power bloc and subaltern classes, and on the unstable balance of compromise between classes. (Cf. Gallas 2016)
Ultimately, Poulantzas sees the state as the (relatively autonomous, non-reflexive) reproduction of the division of labor within capitalist relations of production, and in a concrete social formation. The capitalist division of labor, whose adequate form Poulantzas sees in Taylorism, creates on the one hand parceled, atomized cells and units, while on the other hand the space-time matrix is serial, cumulative, continuous, and homogeneous, most clearly indicated in assembly line production. (Poulantzas 1978: 57) With such statements, Poulantzas relates both law and the institutional structure of state apparatuses more or less directly to relations of production, which are characterized on the one hand by the individualization of producers and on the other by the synthesis of labor (social division of labor or labor-organizational effects of the production process in large-scale industry). It is easy to see that this leads to an analogization of the empirical determinations of the production process subsumed under capital in real terms and of the legal and organizational forms of state apparatuses. While the view of the relative autonomy of the state implies precisely not only the connecting moment of the state to the relations of production, ultimately Poulantzas more or less presupposes the relative autonomy of the state without explicating it more precisely. At least, Poulantzas vehemently opposes attempts at justification regarding a determination of the relative autonomy of the state, which can be attributed to the so-called state derivation debate, because its determination of the circulation/exchange relation as the first reference for the derivation of the legal and state form makes the inclusion of the class character of the relations of production in political theory impossible. At this point, quite independently of the validity of the arguments put forward in the state derivation debate, Poulantzas is to be criticized for not possessing a logical concept of capital himself, and also for this reason for simply overemphasizing the importance of the class struggles that seem to be constitutive of capital; one can even say that he gives the struggles a strangely rational, even natural foundation and makes them a driving force without justification. Moreover, since he does not specify the relation of circulation-production and places the emphasis of the configuration of the relation of state and economy on the reproduction by the state of the division of labor in the relations of production, on the one hand the inner relation between circulation and production in the form of capital is not grasped, or, to put it in other words, on the one hand circulation cannot be grasped as that of capital, while on the other hand the relation of economy and state remains unexplained.
The form-analytic theories of the state, if we stay briefly with the terms coined by Althusser, do not treat the state at the level of the concrete formation of society, but more generally at the level of the mode of production. The attempt to determine the state in its basic features from circulation in general has a direct relation to the new German value critique, a specific reception of Marx’s value-form analysis, which developed after the events of May 1968 (representative of this is Blanke, et al. 1974). However, long before this, the Russian legal theorist Paschukanis in 1923 raised the original Marxian question of why content must take on a form, in order to concretize the question of why the class rule of capital actually requires the form of an extra-economic, an apparatus of state power governing by means of abstract-general laws. Paschukanis writes: “Why does it take the form of official state rule, or – which is the same thing – why is the apparatus of state coercion not created as a private apparatus of the ruling class, why does it split off from the latter and take the form of an impersonal apparatus of public power detached from society?” (Paschukanis 2003: 116) To put it briefly, the general form determinations of the capitalist state (state power by means of public power) are explained by Paschukanis as a necessary implication of the principles of law already inherent in commodity exchange (between formally free commodity owners). The explanatory reference to (capitalist) commodity exchange is the hallmark of this position on the theory of law and the state, or, in other words, the sphere of circulation, which is by no means conceived as a semblance but as a real form of the material reproduction of capital constituted by exchange (and thus as a component of the relations of production), is here the starting point for determining the form of the state.
The relation between value-form/commodity-form and state-form is thus mediated by the legal form. According to the theorists, the value relation/commodity form as a constitutive economic form exists independently of people’s will (Blanke, et al. 1974: 70), but at the same time requires a common agreement among commodity owners so that they can relate their products to each other as commodities at all. The commodity form thus implies a specific social relationship between people, since commodities “cannot go to market themselves” (MEW 23: 99). Therefore, an adequate form must exist that allows the isolated private owners to relate to each other as subjects. For this, the commodity owners must recognize each other as free and equal private owners of their products and express this in a mutually binding agreement of wills. For this, they in turn need the contract, which is thus considered the “original legal figure” (Blanke, et al.: 71). And this implies a real abstraction: As the exchange abstracts from the use value, it also abstracts from the concrete individuals, with which on the one hand the value form and on the other hand formally free and equal legal subjects are only conceivable. If, with Marx, one can then speak of the legal content determining the legal form, then to the extent that this content, which can be identified as an economic relation, itself exhibits a specific legal form: the content, which concerns socially necessary, abstract labor, must not only find an economic form (value form), but also a legal form, which inevitably reproduces itself consciously or unconsciously in the cognitive structures of the actors.
Finally, in order to think the state, the abstract legal form must be codified in the state as a legislature (“substantive legal certainty”) and guaranteed as an executive (“enforcement certainty”). However, the enforcement of law presupposes that the state succeeds in monopolizing force beyond the sphere of disposal of private commodity owners – although the legal forms are a necessarily immanent condition for the exchange of commodities, in order to produce effects they must be able to be enforced with coercion precisely in the case of conflict, so that an authority monopolizing the instruments of repression, namely the state, is the condition for the legal relations and thus at the same time for the regulated exchange of commodities. The state monopoly on the use of force to enforce law is thus a constitutive moment of the state, which in its relative separation from production always also sets conditions for a reasonably smooth reproduction of capitalist accumulation.
In the theory of state derivation, general law functions as a state principle of form adequate to legal relations, each of which is already related to circulation, in which, in turn, individuals relate to each other as formally free and equal representatives of commodities. This legal and impersonal procedure marks abstract equality insofar as its effect can be no other than an equal effect for all. In the state derivation debates, however, the imaginary dimension of the political ideas propagating freedom, equality and justice is already forgotten here, because the circulation of a special commodity, namely that of labor power, does not come into view. It is the imaginary identification of (value-added) labor and equivalently exchanged labor power that explains, in genetic terms, the production of imaginary political ideas. It is then, in fact, the economic sphere of circulation, namely the sale and purchase of labor power (which appears as the sale and purchase of labor), which causes the political ideas of freedom and equality.
Due to a salto mortale, one can also call it a “dialectical coupling” of production and circulation (which is presented as a relation of coexistence or causality or, alternatively, as a functional relation), the rule of law is still shown by the derivation theorists to be a class state: Namely, the “dialectical coupling” mediates the freedom/equality of the actors on the level of circulation and the unfreedom/inequality on the level of production (class society: ownership of the means of production by the capitalists, while the workers freed from it own nothing but their labor power). And thus the capitalist state has a double existence, namely as a state of law and a class state, as a state which, in addition to its function as a state of law, by which it guarantees the formally free and equal subject of law, at the same time secures the reproduction of capital. (Ibid.: 72f.)
Now, however, it becomes apparent that the theory of the derivation of the state, which primarily capitulates on the commodity and value form, separates circulation and production from each other (as does precisely Poulantzas, albeit through other modes of justification), at least the mediation remains vague, precisely because one uses a truncated concept of circulation oneself (namely, merely the circulation of commodities). Indeed, in the analysis of both capital and the state, it is not the commodity form but surplus value and the monetary circulation of capital that is to be assumed; that is, commodification is ever already linked to surplus value production and capitalization, and if discussions of the commodity form, commodification, or the market do not raise the question of surplus value/capital, they are to be rejected from a Marxist point of view. And if the state has precisely an interest in itself with regard to its apparatuses and personnel, this means that the capitalist state, which is sui generis a fiscal state, is structurally dependent on the production of a surplus in the capitalist accumulation process.
Let us briefly present why the state derivation theories have a completely truncated notion of circulation. Marx, in Capital Volume 2, assumes three circuits of industrial capital, namely, money capital, productive capital (constant and variable capital), and commodity capital, capturing the entire circuit of capital, in which that of money capital is included, in the process formula G – W (PM, AK) … P … W’ – G’. Besides the production time (P), this cycle includes two phases of circulation, namely the preparation time (G-W) and the realization time (W-G). The whole process in temporal terms Marx calls the circulation time. However, Marx uses the term circulation not only for the two phases of buying and selling commodities, but also for the entire duration of capital turnover, which thus also includes production. Marx then speaks of the total circulation time of a given capital. (MEW 24: 154) The entire circulation of capital is the circulation of money capital, insofar as this comprehensively structures, represents and integrates the circulatory movements, more precisely the spiral movements of capital, as it also implies disturbances within the circulations, insofar as it itself functions as a respective shifting center. (MEW 24: 31ff.) This formula of monetary capital circulation is the primary mechanism of capital economy, constantly accompanying and including commodity production as production-for-profit and production-for-circulation. It is true that money capital is also a passing moment of the entire reproduction process of capital, as Marx notes (MEW 25: 406), but once capitalization is set as the formation of fictitious capital, i. e. for Marx the most developed form of capital, then in relation to it any qualitative differences of the industrial and commercial individual capitals, their production processes and their commodities, are erased. Marx writes: “… And all capital, according to its expression of value, is money capital.” (Ibid.: 406) Foreign or own money capital is the motor for industrial enterprises that buy goods (machinery, buildings, energy, raw materials, software, etc.) and rent labor so that products enriched with surplus value can be produced and also realized, so that there is a new formation of money capital. Machinery, energy, products or production processes are not capital in themselves. Marx has shown that the above formula is the decisive expression of all the economic relations that correspond to capital, and in this, of course, production is included, which functions as a purely functional process, a process for the production of profit. Capital binds the production process ever already to its monetary metamorphoses or to the (monetary) total circulation, i. e. production is to be understood as a function and phase of the circulation of capital (in the second comprehensive sense), the general form of which can be described in the following formula: G-W-P-W’-G’.
Now what does all this mean for the determination of the state? The effective power of the capitalist state consists precisely in the fact that it does not possess absolute autonomy and thus must observe the axiomatics immanent in capital, which we have only briefly sketched here, and translate them into political power through its own apparatuses, and in this respect the state is to be understood precisely as relatively external to the mechanisms of capital accumulation, which are determined by the totality of processes of production and circulation, while it itself reproduces the economic-social relations in a specific way through its interventions and thus finds itself within the capital system, precisely when it tries to cushion the consequences of the frictions and dynamics within capital accumulation, for instance by inventing counter-tendencies against the fall of the rate of profit, or by absorbing superfluous capital through its kind of antiproduction.
To this statement we must presuppose that the state, which is never given as such, is in latency (virtual) as a form, and thus is only given as a concrete historical state, which, however, always makes it appear as the reactualization of an abstract paradigm that forms and realizes its own horizon. Thus, the state form is always already there and is always reborn, reactualizing an origin that never existed. This idealistic construction always refers anew to the ideal form of the state, which is presupposed by the material conditions of the state, but the state as a form of the state can only identify itself as the self-movement of its idea (Hegel) because it is incapable of locating its emergence in time. (Cf. Sibertin-Blanc 2016: 19f.) Thus, the state form contains a double excess, namely that of its ideality (the self-movement of its concepts) and that of materiality, which is condensed in the historical apparatuses of appropriation of the state. In this, the materialist theory of the state has to assume that the state is first and foremost an apparatus of appropriation, which means that it must be asked why the accumulation of its economic stock qua taxes (not capital accumulation as flow and potency) takes the objective form of the movement of self-constitution of a body of power that appropriates a monopoly over what it takes and distributes. The paranoid structure inscribed in the form of the state (it must always presuppose itself) makes it possible precisely to misjudge that the state is an apparatus of appropriation, but also precisely the impossibility of this appropriation, the latter, however, not with respect to the impossibility of the structure of self-supposition (form of the state), but of the impossibility of being able to close off the self-supposition without including that which constantly escapes from it and challenges its closure, that is, without recognizing what it always remains dependent on as a fiscal state, namely the economy. The generic factor of state decomposition in the form of self-referential state paranoia is the same as the historicization of the state form, specifically the capitalist tax state.
From the 17th century onwards, “good governance” is considered as an economic governance that must be accompanied by a certain state rationality of discourses, of justifications and of procedures, thus already proving the proto-capitalist state as a kind of enterprise that produces a specific field of intervention with which to create new objects, such as population, territories and nations, that exist above all to promote the general wealth of its own economy. Thus, the law, the sovereign state power and the democratic system of representation are far from being sufficient to maintain, on the one hand, the control of the multiplicity of objects and, on the other hand, that of the physical body of the state itself (not the representative one); rather, the capitalist state also needs an arsenal of technological-economic methods and instruments to master the state problem, which always revolves around the stimulation of the production of the general wealth. Thus, economic state interventions and their technologies of power from the 17th century onwards must always be understood as a reaction to the growth of industrial production and population, with, conversely, the accumulation of capital and people corresponding to the increase of state power.
The issuance of state money, tax revenues, and the public budget are crucial elements of a state sovereignty that, by means of its apparatuses, has taken over the financial management and modes of disposition of public funds, creating a quasi-autonomous field of intervention into which, however, particular interests from outside always seep in, threatening the sovereignty of the state, especially since, when the state levies taxes, it makes itself dependent on the wealth and income of others. This dependence is further forced by the issuance of government bonds, or credit-based government financing, which is tied to financial capital. Thus, the state treasury becomes a fictitious and abstract legal entity that marks an instance of impersonal continuity-it is even spoken of as the soul of the state, but which the state sovereign can never fully take under its control precisely because it must collect taxes from uncertain private entities, businesses and households. At this point, state sovereignty and the capitalist economy intertwine in a very peculiar way. (Cf. Vogl 2015: 76f.)
The trinity of the military, state borrowing, and tax collection must be considered an important movens of the solidification of the capitalist state and its apparatuses, keeping in mind that taxes and state debt, which serve to secure state sovereignty, are also the very things that put the state in a bind. If, according to a common definition, such as that put forth by Carl Schmitt, only the sovereign can decide on the state of exception, actors (financiers) and mechanisms (public debt and taxes) are needed to make this decision possible in the first place. Conversely, public debt drives capital accumulation and private wealth creation. With the intertwining of taxes, public credit, and public debt, a diagrammatic, strategic, and political-economic field or dispositif of power was established early in the history of capitalism that testifies to a specific interplay between the state and capital (as opposed to the relative autonomy of the state vis-à-vis capital). Within this field, a “seigniorial power” (ibid: 69f.) developed from the 17th century onwards, by means of which diverse fractions of capital managed to creep into and establish themselves in the political-economic field with a certain independence vis-à-vis juridical sovereignty, parliaments, the executive, and the technologies of the administrative state apparatuses themselves, a field whose cohesive forces were characterized from the beginning by diffuse, unstable, and informal constellations of forces between state and capital. With regard to this politico-economically situated entanglement of state and capital, Joseph Vogl speaks of diagrammatic arrangements in which heterogeneous units, informal power relations, and strategic politics are intermingled, although there are always condensations and fusions and thus the production of structures of unification, however fragile.
The issue at stake here is not so much the problem of the relative separation of state and economy, but rather the internal connection, however fragile, between state power and private capital accumulation, which calls for a specific type of power. According to Vogl, this type of seigniorial power can be characterized by the following genealogical features (ibid.: 69ff.) 1) Power refers to heterogeneous structures composed of legal regularities, private capital movements and state interventions, i.e. modes that converge as well as diverge in specific constellations, whereby the activation of state power cannot be completely separated from capital power. From this meta-organizational point of view, state and economy are to be understood as equally original. 2) Fiscality, characterized by taxes and the public debt, drives the production of general wealth, while conversely it also remains dependent on it. 3) The conversion of parts of state power into private capital power was characterized early on by the establishment of heterogeneous assemblages (Bank of England) in which the integration of legal rules, political interventions, economic infrastructures and diverse capital strategies occurred through the management of the system of state debt. With the transfer of sovereign credit under the rule of private risk management, the speculative financing of private capital has become permanent. 4) With the issuance of government bonds, the state increasingly submits to the power of private creditors, resulting in the increased triggering of credit cycles that can no longer be separated from the capitalization of fictitious capital. 5) The informal connection between state structures and private capitalization gradually solidifies, enabling the creation of stable infrastructures for the circulation of money and capital and, at the same time, strengthening the credit system, which in turn makes possible the extensive trading of fictitious capital.
With the processes of stabilization of public debt, taxation and credit, which have established the economic state, another sovereign power has emerged precisely in the various monetary and fiscal affairs, which escapes the immediate grasp of the state, namely the central or central bank. At the same time, however, an even higher degree of interconnectedness and organizational density is developing between private-sector, state and transstate structures and institutions, namely at the systemic level (coordination of state government practices and economics), at the technical level (alignment of monetary policy with capital) and, finally, at the personnel level. Central banks form the hinge for co-evolution between state structures and (financial) capital, as a result of which mutual dependencies are reinforced and, at the same time, a new specific para-state type of power emerges.
2) The state monopoly on the use of force
Let us start like this: The capitalist state, in historically long agonizing processes of concentration, involving in particular the monopolization of the military and taxation, appropriates the power potential of physical violence arising from these processes (which is rather trivially also called public violence), this appropriation and concentration process being at the same time a process of dispossession and separation (it dispossesses the population of power and thought). The state monopoly of violence, which, however, this much should already be said, cannot do without the appropriation of “symbolic capital” (Bourdieu) by the state, is thus formed on the basis of struggles and historical expropriations. While physical power has its visible apparatuses in the state army and police, at the same time, on the basis of the state’s fiscal power, a unified economic space is formed, the national market. In this process, the state monopoly of taxation and military force are mutually dependent, insofar as tax revenues (plus public debt) allow the state to economically secure the monopoly on military force, the use of which, in turn, makes it possible to stabilize the monopoly on tax revenues. (Bourdieu 2014: 232) Through its repressive state apparatuses (police, army, judiciary, government, etc.), the state exerts a more or less direct coercion on the population, explicitly establishing a corporeal order that requires the management, shaping, and disciplinary integration of bodies into a series of other institutions and apparatuses, such as schools. (Poulantzas 1978: 27) In this context, the question must also always be asked as to which group or class, if the state constitutes itself as the holder of legitimate physical and symbolic violence, can claim the monopoly on this monopoly.
And it is necessary to point out another aspect. The state is forced to use a very nasty trick to disguise its monopoly on violence: State lawmaking, secured by the monopoly on violence, implies an original operation of destroying the social signification of violence in the social corpus itself, such as is still known in pre-state societies, or, to put it differently, the legal codification of violence by the state presupposes a sovereign decoding of violence, namely a desocialization of violence (a separation of violence from the social field), which now itself no longer appears as a mode of social relations that can be codified, ritualized, and regulated. The state sovereign can now bring violence itself into all social fields and make it proportional to the demands of the social body by framing it as a practice supervised by the judiciary and police, thereby limiting the use of violence in the social field and at the same time legitimizing its own use of it, so that now violence is used purely as a technique that serves the security of the citizens and is still demanded by them, with which, finally, every non-state violence appears as the first violation of the social order, to which the state sanction, carried out by means of violence, responds only secondarily. To summarize briefly, “The extraordinary accumulation of physical means of coercion by the capitalist state goes hand in hand with its constitutional character” (ibid. 1978: 72).
At the same time, the liberation of the flows of capital and labor by means of the famous primitive accumulation did not proceed without the manifold a-legal interventions of state power, and as soon as the specific combination of the flows of labor and capital had taken root in the factories and the capitalist economy was able to produce the conditions of its own reproduction, there followed not a disappearance of violence, but merely a dual transformation of its economy: the translation of violence into both the social relations of the economy and the legal political relations took place. Violence now becomes structural and tends to be reproduced in the normal order of social relations.
The processes of monopolization in the state and symbolic power
In exaggeration, Norbert Elias, especially when he focuses not only on the tax state but also on its symbolic power, speaks of the state as an organized criminal gang that collects taxes in much the same way as the Mafia extorts protection money. Elias sums up: 1. the state is an extortion gang, but not only. 2. it is a legitimate extortion gang. 3. it is a legitimate extortion gang in the symbolic sense. (Elias 1976: 2887f.) The symbolic, which is closely linked to the institutions of the state, is an effect of power, which consists in the production and naturalization of a legitimizing doxa, both of which are based on relatively arbitrary presuppositions inscribed in the state during its formative stages. (Bourdieu 2014: 208) In this process, state institutions exist in objectivity and in subjectivity, in things and in brains, but precisely by existing in the objectivity of regulations and in mental structures, state institutions also disappear, making us forget that they had a beginning, and this beginning even when we consider that the beginning, according to Derrida, is the beginning of the beginning. Because of its naturalization, the state can easily play with the so-is-it effect, which is imposed on the population by subtle mechanisms and which it has to accept without any ifs or buts, although the state always has to listen to the concerns of the population, which is always divided into different classes, in order to be able to produce the always fragile consensus in the first place. Thus, the state usually produces various and relatively open discourses and knowledge techniques to represent and divide the classes, but it must always close the space of possibilities, especially for the dominated classes, whereby other possibilities of association and class relations become unthinkable for the latter or are not to be retrievable any further, especially precisely resistance. However, the representatives in the state must also realize again and again that certain conjunctures of the economic, political and social struggles reach beyond their sphere of influence and the apparatuses, escape from them, yes, even further, the state, if it tries to close itself off or again and again only to presuppose itself, must include precisely what escapes from its form of interiority (decoded flows) or what even tries to destroy it itself (the nomadic war machine).
Let us mention it, the state is not a subject of action (it does nothing), nor is it a container into which something (classes, for instance) flows. In the spirit of Nietzsche against we assume that the subject-predicate structure of language does not reflect any ontological reality existing before it. The materiality of the state solidifies and condenses in long historical phases of concentration and monopolization, marked by social and political struggles, in which certain groups, under certain conditions, appropriate various “varieties of capital” (physical, economic, cultural, symbolic, informational, etc.) in order to be able to function themselves as a kind of incorporation of the “metacapital” that has the property of being able to exercise power over the various varieties of capital. The state as the owner of this “meta-capital” always remains a meta-field within which different classes and groups struggle for the possession of the meta-capital/symbolic capital precisely because it gives them the power of disposal over the other varieties of capital. (Ibid: 348)
For Bourdieu, the accumulation and concentration of symbolic capital is a crucial aspect in the genesis of the state; indeed, for him, the state is the “central bank of symbolic capital” (ibid.: 222), the space where the unquestionably recognized signs of legitimate culture, such as educational qualifications, nation and language, as well as other realities, are generated and guaranteed to circulate as a matter of course in all social fields. An unconditional prerequisite of the concentration processes of physical violence, “information capital,” and “economic capital” is thus “symbolic capital,” which is simply necessary to make the monopolization of the various types of capital appear legitimate; think, for example, of the argument that the levying of taxes serves to secure the nation to the outside world (patriotism). Moreover, the symbolic forms require the “production and canonization of certain social classifications” (ibid.: 29), most of which follow a fiscal logic. These classification procedures begin with the conduct of censuses and continue with the invention of universally accepted and thus not further debatable principles of categorization, from the division of working people into occupational and grade groups, to educational qualifications, to national identity. In this process, it is not the population that empowers the state, but, conversely, it is the state that, by means of statistics and further inquiry procedures, first brings forth the population and the social classifications that characterize it, for, for example, in order to be able to levy taxes, the state must be precisely informed about the incomes or assets of its population, for which, in turn, techniques such as bookkeeping, archiving, valuation procedures and legal regulations are needed. Statistics are tied from the beginning to the state, which uses them to establish generalized forms, categories of equivalence, and terminologies that eliminate the singularity of an individualized situation, either through the categories of law or through a multiplicity of norms and standards (economics of risk management and efficiency).
Moreover, symbolic power requires the monopolization of language by the state, which it enforces as the official language through the mechanisms of law, school, and university, quite a historical coercion of the soft kind that results in the normalization of language and the subjects who use it, whereby the latter at some point voluntarily renounce their own perspectives, dialects, and ways of speaking, and thus the equivalence of all perspectives and discourses. In the state, then, official language and writing are concentrated, the latter comprising the legislative code and the former the communicative code. And all citizens of the state must follow both code and code at all costs if they do not want to run the risk of suffering some kind of exclusion and sanction. In a certain sense, however, the state does not monopolize the writing; rather, it issues it in order to pre-determine the coming discourses and the places of administration that cross the hierarchically structured space of the state apparatuses, and in so doing it creates, among other things, those conditions that are necessary for the training and qualification of the labor force.
What is essential to note here is simply that the processes of homogenization, standardization and unification, through which the state is transformed into the state in the first place, are accompanied by the processes of its reproduction, which are by no means smooth. In this context, for example, factors such as the school-leaving certificate, nation, education, or orthography are always generated and reproduced as forms of misrecognition, insofar as these factors seem to somehow fall from the sky and thus their genesis is eliminated. For this very reason, Bourdieu discusses the monopolizations existing in the state not only in terms of their functionality, but, similar to Poulantzas, he understands them conflictually, integrated into power relations and into the processes of the differentiation of power. Thus, the analysis of symbolic capital cannot avoid paying attention to the relation that exists between symbolic power potentials and those actors who are able to sort out the diverse potentials in order to deal with them effectively in their own interest and, moreover, to present exactly this kind of functionalization as legitimate. (Ibid. : 337) In doing so, the dominant groups manage to condense the valid rules in the state as if they were the common interest of all segments of the population, or, to put it another way, the capitalist state, with special regard to the interests of the ruling classes, must take into account all strata and groups, belonging to its territory and at the same time characterized by segregation, homogenize as native population, attributing to it a common interest and identifying its atoms at the same time as citizens of the state, in order to distinguish them from the others/foreigners (the populations of other states as well as the migrants fleeing from other territories). To put it briefly, the state is the place from which the official speaks: it is considered a reliable producer of symbolic forms, of principles of division and structuring structures, which are accumulated and concentrated, and serve in particular those who manage to obtain obedience and recognition by appropriating the symbolic forms. What the population also ultimately agrees on, because at any given moment the state is inscribed not only in the political field, but in the minds of the people.
In this regard, the modern formation of the nation and nationalism play an important role in the homogenization of the population; the nation constitutes a specially designed cohesion of social classes within a closed economy, namely the national economy as the representation of total capital, whereby the state tends to unify the internal and separate it from the external, the non-national. And from the outset, the state wants to know everything about the internal processes on its territory, it wants to calculate, evaluate and measure, so that the processes of concentration taking place within itself are always those of unification of the body of society as well as those of production of certain forms of knowledge. For example, the metric system is a universal standard, i.e. set by the state, which on the one hand sets conditions for integration, concentration and unification of things, and on the other hand leads to massive devaluations of local units of measurement.
Finally, the process of monopolization goes hand in hand with that of universalization, whereby it is especially the agenda of professional lawyers and state officials that appropriates and monopolizes the prerogative of the universal (the claim that one acts in the name of the general public). At the same time, the standardization of language, education, etc., leads to an ever higher degree of universalization and integration (the local loses weight); it is a prerequisite of the concentration of state power. Finally, internal economic unification (the economic field becomes a market) and the construction of a unified space as well as a homogeneous time structure are accompanied not only by universalization but also by the construction of relatively autonomous and differentiated fields in the state.
4) State, field and state apparatuses.
The state is generally characterized by hierarchized and centralized state apparatuses, and yet it must consist of a number of different apparatuses, and the linking of the apparatuses requires axiomatics – laws, rules, and competences – as well as legitimacy established through the people-nation construction. (Poulantzas 1978: 47) It regulates the monetary system and includes apparatuses that include the police, the military, the judiciary, and the administration, which, in their respective operations, policies, and practices, guarantee private property, ensure compliance with contracts based on it, and establish the rules for the circulation of economic agents. For the functioning of enterprises located in a national site, a state-organized sector, independent to a certain extent, which provides a series of social and infrastructural services such as research, science, health, postal and telecommunications services, energy and water supply and the construction and maintenance of the transport network as a public entity, maintaining the conditions of reproduction for the entire national economy, is absolutely necessary, even if today parts of the infrastructure are subject to privatization. At the same time, the state supports the accumulation of capital, for example, by compensating low wages with social programs and by absorbing and financing so-called externalities (such as the repair of environmental damage). The reproduction of labor power and areas of collective consumption are now integrated into the institutions of police-social control, think here of modern labor legislation (workfare), social housing, education, etc., although today the hard forms of enclosure (prisons, asylums, workhouses) have been supplemented by more flexible and wide-ranging networks, but which produce a depth of control that the old enclosures of disciplinary societies could not even afford (social institutions such as daycare centers, the differentiation of social police, intelligence services, etc.).
The state apparatuses, be they economic, repressive, or ideological state apparatuses, are enclosed in a specific field structured according to power relations based on specific forms of power and and economic strategies. And the organization of a field takes place – within a quasi-play of immanent moments – through the inscription of implicit regularities, habits, rules and sanctions in the field. The state itself is a field of struggle in which one wins precisely when one perfectly masters the immanent rules of the game. In this context, the field itself should be understood neither as an expression of necessity nor as contingent, but rather as the state of a relation that exists between the field as the historical product of a social space (objectified structure) and the structure incorporated by the agents, which includes the habitus. The study of the field here involves the analysis of a process that has a fuzzy logic without a subject.
The rules function relatively smoothly in the state field most of the time because they have their ground in the law of the series and are constantly brought into play anew through series; on the other hand, they are also taken out of play, the latter precisely because the rules of the game cannot be negotiated as, say, in a game, but because in the state field the dispute over the rules constantly gives way to the production of a consensus, however fragile, and further compromises. The rules, however, are usually more internal than external to the game. The constraints under which the game is played in the field are themselves products of differential play. What distinguishes specific play in the state field from play in general is that the rules that govern the field (not the game) are implicit political regularities or customary practices that not only guide strategies but are also inscribed in the unconscious of the actors. (Bourdieu 2014: 177) In this process, the immanent rules remain mostly unspoken, but if one defies them, they are also brought into play again and again through punishments and sanctions.
5) The Economic State Apparatus
For Deleuze/Guattari (as for Poulantzas) the most important state apparatus is definitely the economic state apparatus. To put it more precisely, the most important aspects of the economic state apparatus are territory, public labor and taxation, i.e. aspects to which specific apparatuses of appropriation correspond, which appropriate stocks such as rents, profits, levies and taxes. These apparatuses, which are by no means to be understood exclusively as state apparatuses, are to be understood as forms of the material constitution of economic stocks. This concerns the problem of the “stateification” of the economy in general. (Cf. Sibertin-Blanc 2016: 45ff.)
In this context, the three aforementioned forms of appropriation (rent, profit, and taxes) are by no means created by legal arrangements or institutions, but can only be understood in the context of the processes of economic and semiotic inscription and objectification in specific social formations: Rent is related to land, profit is related to productive activities, and taxes are related to exchange. To put it more precisely, differential rent implies the possibility of comparing different territories as well as the corresponding successive exploitations of the territory. Profits extracted from the application of labor power by capital imply the possibility of comparing different activities in terms of their relations in time. And to tax a transaction or a good requires the possibility of comparing goods and services by means of money as a measure. The form of the state depends on this semiotic-economic functioning of the material apparatuses, which in turn must provide for it specific productions of knowledge, converging actions, inscriptions in the bodies and territories, goods and signs, actions and circulations. If the state seems to presuppose itself as an idea that is always already there, then the material constitution of the apparatuses usually goes unnoticed, disregarding above all the surplus in terms of forms of appropriation. Which is why it is essential to note: differential rent presupposes absolute rent, productive labor presupposes surplus labor, and the monetary market presupposes taxes. And the appropriation not only establishes a relation between the relative comparison and the monopolistic appropriation, but itself presupposes the monopolistic appropriation, which of course is always structurally present in the field of the comparable. Appropriation by the state, in turn, does not mean a merely juridical appropriation, but means the constitution of a mode of objectification, tracking, and identification of economic structures and things, by which the deduction and appropriation of the state appears as objectively inscribed in its nature. And taxes are unquestionably the decisive means of power for the state, they are for it the monetary magnet to which the other elements, rent and profit, are merely added from its point of view. (Ibid.)
The processes of unification and integration also characterize the transformation of the local market into the national market. In this process, the state does not unify a pre-existing market, but institutionalizes a completely new kind of national market, a homogeneous one, through the setting of borders and laws, whereby the inside and the outside of the territory first come into existence. Thus, the state is in a very specific way constitutive for the capitalist economy, that is, it creates, transforms and produces real power relations, so that it by no means only ex negativo fixes certain rules of the game for the economy, as is still thought, for example, in the conception of the state by Althusser and Gramsci, where the state is reduced to prohibitive repressive state apparatuses and belief-making ideological state apparatuses (and thus the existence of an economic state apparatus is not even considered). This has also been pointed out by Poulantzas, who attributes dominance to economic state apparatuses. (Poulantzas 1978: 28) Consider, for example, the important function that the Ministry of Finance (and the tax offices) have in the state, and whose management staff today is often interspersed with representatives of the big banks. But it is not even primarily a problem of personnel interdependence, but of structural interdependence between the state and capital, which indicates the asymmetry of this relationship. Not too long ago, in 2010 to be precise, the finance ministries of the leading countries, in cooperation with their central banks, made it their business to use so-called stress tests to re-stabilize banks’ profits after the financial crisis, with financial stability now being elevated to one of the main objectives of state economic policy, alongside employment and inflation control. Thus, banks’ profits and the adequacy of their capitalization become important variables in Treasury policy, which seeks to regulate by developing models that provide information about likely future trajectories of returns based on macroeconomic relations. The executive power in the form of the Ministry of Finance is an essential part of the state apparatus, to whose imperatives the other ministries and apparatuses have to subordinate themselves. The economic state apparatus is generally characterized by the fact that it invents a wide instrumentarium of rules, projects and laws to counteract, in particular, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the economy, through measures that serve to increase relative surplus value by increasing the productivity and intensity of labor (qualification and reproduction of the labor force, social benefits and training and housing policies, innovation, research, etc.) and the devaluation of constant capital (parts of capital can produce at a negative rate of profit if the state subsidizes them). But the decisive factor remains the increase in the rate of surplus value.
Let us now come to the illustration of the condensation of the relationship between the state and (financial) capital. Today, the state affirms the legality and legitimacy of transactions to the financial system, precisely when the latter uses legal money as part of its own liquidity reserves, through a series of laws and rules, and this kind of affirmation is extended by the fact that in times of financial crises the state not only assumes liability for the solvency of private banks, but also saves them from bankruptcy with enormous sums of money (bailout). Many banks facing insolvency in 2008 were thus rescued by the states under the motto “too big/too central to fail,” i.e., because of their systemic relevance, their size and their integration into a dense network of financial organizations, with temporary nationalizations of major banks also taking place. In the process, the socialization of private banks’ losses caused government debt to rise dramatically. There is today an implicit subsidization of private banks by the state’s bailout promises.
By affirming the creation of credit by the commercial banks, the state leaves to financial capital another important function in the economy; it affirms in principle that the financial assets of the capitalist economy are, if possible, allocated to capital accumulation and that the private banks throw the fictitious and speculative capital into circulation for profit. The state must thus leave the execution of the important parameters of capital accumulation, capitalization, relative price movements, etc., to the divergent practices and strategies of capital in the context of competition. Thus, even state money remains ever already tied to the functions of “private capitalist” money (general equivalent, means of payment, and money capital), to the private financial system, and to the liquidity of the banks with which they settle their liabilities against each other. Conversely, legal money is an indispensable reserve for commercial banks, which undoubtedly functions as money and, at the same time, as collateral that banks need, albeit only to a small extent, for their credit creation. By virtue of state disposition, legal money is a means which, notwithstanding its material worthlessness, enables the power of access of private property to the capacities of an economy. It should be noted that legal money can be used to redeem any monetary debt. This is only one aspect. Already the determination of the price quantities, which are merely represented by the legal tender, results from the movements of the circulation of goods, money and capital. What the units of legal tender, which are related to the priced goods, are “worth” themselves, remains dependent on capital accumulation and the ever-changing sums of goods and services, whose prices/exchange values are written down in legal tender units. Therefore, until today there is no absolutely valid legal definition of money to report. Who throws the money in which quantity and which form into the circulation, that can be prescribed evenly not by the state legally, which one recognizes also by the fact that the Giralgeldschöpfung of the private banks is subject until today to no sufficient legal regulation, yes the Giralgeld of the commercial banks is accepted by the state as quasi-valid money form, is however officially nevertheless no legal tender, although it functions from convention or because of “good faith” like a legal tender.
The monetary needs of the state are financed through taxes (and government bonds); the state pursues a flexible policy here by raising or lowering certain types of taxes, reducing public spending and privatizing. The tax system is a sui generis relationship of domination and exploitation. Only the state is able to finance itself through taxes, which are to be seen as a deduction from the profits of companies and from the wages of private households. Thus, taxes represent the hinge between the economy and politics. Insofar as taxes are sums of money that do not function directly as capital accumulation, they are withdrawn from the direct power of disposal of capital, which the latter, however, partly recovers by trading in government bonds. The declared goal of the state is and remains the promotion of national economic growth (economic performance within its own territory; the nation as a location for capital), which today is officially expressed in the indicator of gross domestic product (GDP).
The level of taxes always remains related to the cyclical phases of capital accumulation and the respective level of national capital strength, and is differentially determined according to the economic performance of enterprises and citizens. Portions of the income of citizens and the income and profits earned by enterprises are collected through direct and indirect taxes. The ministries of finance and economics constantly review certain projects for their effects on growth and set priorities with regard to government spending, so that cuts and shortages can be expected again and again for certain areas of the national budget that are classified merely as “consumptive” according to the productivity requirements of capital, while money is constantly mobilized for government spending that is considered “investment. Where private capital finds the investments necessary for national growth too risky – think, for example, of medium- or long-term research expenditures and basic research, neither of which is profitable in the short term – the state itself must assume the financing and the risks inherent therein. In the neoliberal phase, there is a wave of privatization of public property and public tasks, there is a reduction in the real wages of employees and in taxes for the owners of capital and high income earners in the course of austerity policies, and there is deregulation of the labor market, which is associated with a stagnation or reduction in real wages and labor costs. The latter, in turn, leads to an expansion of various forms of private debt, which are directly connected to the movements and flows of money in the financial markets. Moreover, an elaborate system of partial privatizations and public-private partnerships is emerging, directed and planned by the large corporate consultancies, and conducive to the further accumulation of fictitious capital.
Let’s move on to government bonds. As the issuer of government bonds, the state is now one of the most important providers of relatively secure promises to pay on the capital market, the trading of which the private banks help to organize. The ability of financial capital to create current investment funds from future monetary capital flows is also used by the state when it issues government bonds in anticipation of future tax revenues and has them transformed into liquid financial resources by the capital markets. Only in this way does the state obtain the funds it needs to finance its tasks without burdening companies and wage earners too heavily with taxes. At the same time, the practice of financing the state not only through taxes but also through government bonds generates important business opportunities for the financial creditors, who constantly intend to book the debts of the states as their own assets. An ever-increasing debt of the leading imperialist states is now an integral part of the world financial system.
On the economic level, the government bonds can be understood as “assets” only insofar as the state is able to repay the borrowed money from its own assets, i.e. through future tax revenues. Ultimately, however, government debt is considered to be covered today as long as the states find new creditors to match the old debt due (interest) with the issuance of new government bonds, which provide them with further funds with which the states can then pay the previous creditors at least the interest on the old debt. This procedure of follow-up financing implies the continuous issuance of government bonds, with which the states secure additional budget funds under the title of “net new debt.” What is capitalized is not so much the future tax revenues, but the cash inflows resulting from the government’s future borrowing.
In financial markets, the economic “quality” of a government’s borrowings is permanently assessed by evaluating, among other things, the government’s fiscal position, its financial trustworthiness, and the security of its future revenues that justify its borrowings. (Rating agencies, which use complicated procedures to determine how creditworthy a government is, are responsible for assessing the government’s creditworthiness). Investors thus expect the government to support national economic growth in return for buying government bonds, which in turn promises the government rising tax revenues. The criteria here refer to the calculation of the relationship between the increase in government securities issuance and the growth of an economy that is always also fiscally resilient, which is judged by investors to be sufficient and is accordingly rewarded with further monetary investment in government bonds. The state is therefore economically dependent not only on the taxes that flow to it from companies and households, but it also needs the sovereign handling of its government bonds, which, however, is determined by the speculative calculations of private investors in the last instance. By issuing bonds, the state subjects its future soundness and political effectiveness as well as its financial needs to permanent evaluation by the financial markets, and this always takes place via investors in comparison with all possible alternative securities traded on the financial markets. This comparison, as well as the relationship between supply and demand for government bonds on the financial markets, which reflects the economic performance of the state and the national total capital, regulates the level of the interest rate on government bonds and, at the same time, provides new indications for their continuous valuation: the interest rate is higher the lower the prospects for future growth of capital accumulation on a national scale and the greater, in proportion, the increase in government debt.
As can easily be seen today, it is not only the absolute amount of government debt that matters to the government in terms of its financing; it is already the interest cost that can drive the government to the brink of insolvency. And this interest burden is based on the absolute amount of debt and the respective interest rate. While governments can still regulate the level of government debt themselves to a certain extent, the interest rate on government bonds is generated on the international financial markets. If certain countries and their banks are considered to be particularly crisis-prone, the capital market risk of both increases and the interest rates on government bonds rise.
Lenders also have an interest in high sovereign debt and high interest rates, but the opposite tendency arises from the fact that above a certain level of sovereign debt and interest rates, repayment of the loans or payment of interest by the government appears increasingly unlikely. It is precisely at this point that lenders then possess a strong interest in the state’s infamous austerity measures, which amount to reducing the state budget in order to propagate further growth: Securing monetary stability, reducing public debt, consolidating the state budget, reducing state social spending and increasing tax revenues – to the extent that the latter does not affect the owners of capital themselves.
6) State, law and legislation
Only when the legal form (law as the abstract unitary principle that unifies private individuals and their discourses) has a relative autonomy, that is, is largely removed from the immediate grasp of the capital class or powerful groups, can one speak of “law” within the capitalist social formation. Law as a relatively autonomous determination of form corresponds to the notion of the relative autonomy of the state. Franz Neumann, a Frankfurt School theorist, also rejected the construction of an identity between law and private techniques of power, as did Paschukanis, who sought to demonstrate that the legal form acquires its distinctiveness only in distinction from theories that conceive of law as an expression of direct repression or exclusively as an authoritative instruction. (Neumann 1984; Paschukanis 2003)
The matter seems even more complicated. Law commonly relies on its formal promises of freedom and claims of equality. However, it is imperative to point out that equality per se is not to be equated with rights; rather, the equality that is fixed in rights is a form determination of equality, that is, the state subsumes equality under the form of law. But since the politically fixed rights (property rights) each already ground and empower the apolitical “property individual” of the capitalist social formation, they implicitly affirm inequality in the economy and, at the same time, the degradation of politics to a mere means of state intervention (to secure the economy in the last instance). The state, through the declaration of rights, separates what it calls civil society from politics, which is now nothing more than the government and administration of civil society, or, to put it another way, state politics specifically constitutes the social police, which is entrusted with the care and administration of civil society. This is also related to the fact that the form of rights inheres a specific shape of regulation, i. e. having a right implies having a legitimate and an obligatory claim. The right can, and does, confer this entitlement, namely to formally free owners, who are subordinate to the political polity and thus also withdrawn from it. By conferring the right to property, the capitalist state allows private property (especially in means of production) to operate in its self-referential way; law exists only on the condition of this kind of attribution and separation. The social body is thus naturalized and subordinated purely to the facticity of existence, precisely by being transformed into the content of legal claims. (Cf. Menke 2015)
Law and right are distinct. Law is an important category of state sovereignty, commonly understood as an abstract substance (law) that refers to formally equal and free citizens who have broken away from territorial and personal ties, as a result of which the legitimacy of the state shifts more to its legality. In this process, the abstractness and universality of the law is inscribed in the bureaucratic-hierarchical structure of the state, which is possible only when it is recognized as a system of formal and axiomatized norms: In this sense, laws and prescriptions, think of administrative law for instance, always regulate the doxa of the state and its discourses, the functioning of written texts and the assignment of agents to particular departments of the state. The law, in its alleged universality, acquires a concrete, a differential meaning precisely when the agents of production are atomized and cut off from the old conditions of labor, and when capitalist relations of production, with their class division between capital and wage labor, are established. With private law, the juridical system guarantees the relations of production in the form of property, the circulation of capital and commodities (through contract law), and the forms of state intervention in the economy.
It is important to insist that law is universal only insofar as it is an integral part of the state’s monopoly of violence, or, to put it another way, it is the “code of organized public violence” (Poulantzas 1978: 69). Laws generate prohibitions and restrictions, but they do not settle only in the negative; they command and impose requirements, make people speak and establish attributions and rights, they deduce areas of application and conditions of state violence. The law thus codifies both commands and prohibitions.
This is where the differentiation of the juridical field comes into play. Historically, jurists early on saw parliament as their preferred venue; jurists were given royal authority to uphold the law. They quickly learned that the state functions precisely as a fictio juris that legitimates itself, also quite real, so that this very fiction underlies all legal creations and jurisdictions to this day. The institutionalized corpus of the jurists themselves consists of knowledge workers organized in networks and representatives of the law, who make the laws, concretize them and apply them. The absolute knowledge of these laws by the jurists is contrasted with the ignorance of the population, who have to behave as laymen of the legal language. Poulantzas sums up, “The modern law is a state secret and establishes a knowledge that is hijacked by the reason of state.” (Poulantzas 1978: 82)
7) About democracy
It does not necessarily correspond to common sense to say that parliamentary democracy is based on the fact that citizens, by voting, relinquish any power to political representatives or delegate it to a professional group of politicians who make decisions on their behalf. But yet it is so; conversely, one could also say that it is only because the representatives exist that the represented group also exists (Bourdieu 2013: 24) We are thus in a circulating, mutually reinforcing attribution. Representatives are members of a corresponding bureaucratic organization (party) and are given a mandate by it. And basically, a political party functions no differently than the church in terms of its modes of legitimation, because in both organizations, delegates represent the usurpation of posts as a service to the organization and especially to those who elected or delegated them. For example, if a minister wants to be recognized as legitimate, he must create a demand for his product and this is done in the following way: By claiming to be there entirely for the people and to speak for them, he makes himself, on the one hand, the people and, on the other hand, erases himself (and thus becomes everything in the first place). This kind of transformation can only be represented, so that the politician as representative must be absorbed into a legal persona that shows that those who are nothing but themselves are nothing because they do not speak for the people, do not speak on their behalf, while he who speaks for the people is precisely everything or omnipotent. Bourdieu calls this construction the “oracle effect” (Bourdieu 2013: 31).
The delegation of power to the state political professionals represents a specific form of expropriation of the population, so that the citizen can only express his or her displeasure by abstaining or not voting within the framework of parliamentary-representative democracy, and often enough this is precisely the only possibility for the lower classes to articulate themselves politically, because they usually do not have the education and political resources to be able to intervene in political debates in public at all, whereby precisely their silence could be understood as revenge against a system that excludes them per se by including them. Their very apathy could be seen, as Baudrillard has done, as an unconscious protest against the monopolization of politics by professional politicians in state apparatuses. (Baudrillard 1986: 97) Those who hold the monopoly on being able to constantly fabricate about the general good of the people are also the ones who hold the monopoly on access to office and thus benefit from most public discourse about the general good.
In doing so, the parties articulate themselves in a political field that they occupy together, but in which they are at the same time in a certain competition with each other, whereby the influence and power of a party is measured not only by its current position in the field, but also by its potency to mobilize the largest possible heterogeneous electorate, which forces each party to be politically vague from the outset. The political position that a party represents is a guiding principle that can be put into practice precisely the larger the proportion of the population that the party can mobilize through its symbolic activities and bring to the ballot box. At the same time, a harmony is to be created in the media field between those who circulate political opinions and those who consume these opinions, whereby in the last instance the political relevance of opinions, discourses and positions lies precisely in the quantitative mass of citizens that must be permanently mobilized. In the opinion polls, which have become epidemic and which increase even more at election times, positions are polled without the production of the formulation and the specific question-answer game, behind which strategies and interests are hidden, being questioned even by the respondents.
The election is part of a political market, which, however, is by no means directed by an invisible hand, but in which, in particular, the experts and representatives of the privileged classes constantly formulate offers that are brought to the citizens through the channels of marketing, the media, television and the Internet, who, in turn, consume the offers and, finally, the electoral act itself, insofar as, with regard to the latter, their political decision-making capacity is diluted to a single syncretic drawing. Ultimately, any potentials of the population to shape f social struggles and conflicts are suspended in the election; rather, by its own logic, the election is “an instrument for blurring conflicts and oppositions” (Bourdieu 2013: 254). Thus, with the elections, the majority undoubtedly recognizes that its influence on ongoing and concrete political decisions is nil, these being taken today often enough apart from representative democratic procedures by a professional-technocratic elite and supranational institutions, precisely to the exclusion and against the population, which, however, must be kept in the democratic game with a minimum of opportunities and rights.
Democracy implies the gesture that the official opinion is the opinion of all, or at least of those who are worthy of having an opinion at all. For this, if one really wants to participate in political operations, one must also be able to play with the rules of the game generated and controlled by the state, precisely by paying the highest tribute to the game that is the state through this play with the rules of the game. This includes the respect, courtesy and decency demanded by the underclasses towards the official authorities, summa summarum they are rules of the game that articulate the obligatory and at the same time fictitious “we” by making believe that the elites and technocrats speak nothing but for this “we”. The parties produce hegemonic discourses and, above all, the belief in the universality of their discourses by producing phantoms, such as Germany, security, foreign infiltration, social justice, the people, freedom, etc., and they then call this democracy, which is welded together by the belief in the phantoms. Democracy, from this point of view, is an accumulated phantomness concentrated in the state, which represents itself as the logic of things. This requires the official discourses or official speeches that circulate within the institutions, the administration, and the public field in order to implement a kind of organized trust that, in turn, sustains the state discourses.
The state is the space of circulation of official speech, public opinion (plus television and media), order, mandates, and ultimately the site of a power still officially recognized in protest. This power has been understood as consensus over long periods of contestation, overlooking the fact that those who speak in the name of the general good, or the universal, are also those who monopolize access to this good (general good), i.e. actors who have the prerogative to appropriate this universal resource by gaining the monopoly on the struggle for the monopoly. This monopolistic appropriation plays into and asserts itself through the field of comparable, free and equal citizens, that is, the privatization of the citizens that make up the state and the representation of their unity in the state form a double movement that converges in democracy. And it is precisely this constellation that ultimately no longer forms a barrier to the legal encroachments of the state into the sphere of the individual-private. (Poulantzas 1978: 62)
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