In a text from 1973, which appeared in the Kursbuch, the sociologist Manfred Clemenz has introduced the concept of structural state fascism, the author assumes that there are no fundamental functional differences between the forms of parliamentary democracy and the fascist states of exception, but just only phenomenological changes are noted, which could take drastic forms and even fractures. This question has definitely shifted. In fact, with regard to the present processes of state fascization, this is not really a new form of government, but also not merely phenomena, the sum of which then constitutes state fascism. The notion of state fascization, which emphasizes the procedural moment from the outset, implies a cyclical or situational change in governance, a shift and finally rearrangement of state apparatuses and governance / forms of governance that have not yet been finalized, so that, on the one hand, the ordinary capital state On the other hand, it is not decided whether the process of fascization will actually lead to a fascist state of exemption. The “institutional preventive dispositif” (Poulantzas 1978: 192), which characterized Poulantzas’s authoritarian etatism in the 1980s, has become so supple and at the same time intensively incorporated into state and non-state apparatuses and institutions and has become a fundamental dispositive (alongside the official state of parliamentary democracy) that not only speaks more of an osmosis between the preventive dispositive and the official state, as Poulantzas does, but the temporary dominance of one. The creeping fascization process characterized by the preventive logic, which is completely new in its structure and does not correspond to any previous historical period of statehood. Due to a specific encoded crisis scenario (counter-terrorism) and especially because of the hegemonic inscription of the preventive logic, the security state today takes political and legal measures that permanently change the apparatus of the normal capitalist state and transform its rule of law, without having to deny it itself.
The coming fascism, which must be quoted as “fascism”, may today take on the form that was still in demand in the 1970s. It should also be noted, however, that the notion of fascism often breaks in just where monstrosities, exceptions and fractures are to be addressed, but for which concepts are still missing. But when the concept of fascism is completely omitted in the struggles for theories and discourses, then no discursively empty space is created long ago. So we are in a difficult terrain. The notion of structural state fascization, which we are using for the time being, is based on historical assumptions that did not exist in the 1970s. Of particular note are the transforming and intensifying exploitation crises of capital, the implementation of neoliberal measures and projects such as financialization, deregulation, austerity, privatization and the global fragmentation of production processes. The resulting effects are now globally equivalent to an ecological and social catastrophe program: More and more people in the periphery are forced to vegetate in the slums of large cities or in failed states. We assume that this crisis development will continue to increase in frequency and intensity, and consequently also the social polarization in the metropolises, but at the same time a return to the national-social state compromise of Fordism, d. H. a historic special period characterized by systemic competition, class compromise, corporatism and Keynesian economic policy, today no longer seems possible. For the reasons mentioned above, the regulation of social fragmentation is increasingly being solved by the police instead of by material gratification. As the state abolishes social benefits, it must repressively upgrade: austerity and authoritarianism go together. Or, to put it another way, the market and strong state are mutually exclusive in neoliberal doctrine but not in practice. That does not contradict itself at all.
State and capital
Now,
before going into the details of fascization, let’s start with the
state in general. As an important component of the modern sovereign
nation state, international law generally considers territory, state
power and population. In the materialistic theory tradition, Nicos Poulantzas, following Louis Althusser,
regarded the state as “the material and specific condensation of a
relation of forces, which is a class relationship,” as a complex field
in which various organizations, apparatuses and institutions, among them
the most assertive ruling class, acting at national and regional
levels. In this sense, the state is neither an autonomous subject nor a
pure tool of the ruling class (as in vulgar Marxism), but not as a
purely neutral instance, as in bourgeois theories, but, and more so
today, specifically within a balance of power or a field as a reliable
organizer and guarantor of the conditions of exploitation and
reproduction of the capital. Precisely as a state of capital, which can
hardly rule against capital, because it depends on its functioning and
its as smooth as possible accumulation, and for that very reason has to
translate the reproduction of capital into political form. It also
supports the accumulation of capital, for example, by compensating low
wages with social programs, by absorbing and financing so-called
externalities (such as the repair of environmental damage) and by
providing certain infrastructures, especially private ones, and finally
the security intensified by the reinforcement of the police. By means of
austerity policy and the redistribution of social wealth, today he
aggressively pursues the class struggle in favor of capital and at the
same time establishes certain functional conditions for capital
utilization. Although the state primarily emphasizes the political
interests of the ruling classes, it is no mere executive organ of
capital but has relative autonomy relative to the economy. In
long agonizing processes of concentration, which emanates from military
power and taxation, the state appropriates exactly the resulting
capital of physical violence, that is, the process of concentration is
at the same time a process of separation (expropriating the people from
power and thought); The state monopoly on power, which, however, can not
do without the appropriation of symbolic capital by the state, is
therefore based on historical expropriations. The state was spawned, so
to speak, in a long coup that establishes once and for all that there is
a single legitimate and dominant point of view that sets the standard
for all other views. State authority has a latent and an open aspect.
The state and the power can usually be content with latent violence,
that is, the open power is kept in reserve. Anyone who constantly
resorts to military means is not, according to Machiavelli, at the
height of the concept of absolute politics. Bourdieu speaks in
his lectures on the state of an organized and legitimate gang of
criminals, extorting protection money, as it may know from Chicago, i.e
it does not differ so much from the state. Bourdieu sums up: 1.
The state is a blackmail gang, but not only. 2. He is a legitimate
blackmailer gang. 3. A legitimate blackmail gang in the symbolic sense. Bourdieu
sees the emergence of the state as a process of integration and
homogenization, acting as a productive objectifying agency: “The state
is closely linked to objectification and all objectification techniques:
it treats social facts as things, people as things – he is a
Durkheimian long before Durkheim. “(Ibid .: 377) Unification and
integration can not be separated from expropriation insofar as knowledge
and competences based on local values and measures are now devalued.
Universalization goes hand in hand with the concentration of
universality. This transition also marks the transformation from the
local market to the national market, whether economic or symbolic.
Exactly the latter level is an effect of the power connected with the
institution of the state, and this effect consists in a naturalization, a
doxa, based on relatively arbitrary premises made at the time of the
creation of the state. The state can then play with the so-is-it-effect,
an extremely violent action of the state that is imposed on the
population and which it has to accept without any ifs or buts. So the
state always closes the space of possibilities, especially that of
resistance.
Historically, in addition
to violence, the state concentrates and monopolizes the symbolic power
that defines a legitimate culture through the production and
canonization of certain social classifications, thereby expropriating
the population from its own deviant forms. His legitimizing role
includes his role as a mediator / mediator between companies and
workers, as a producer of labor rights and a social safety net. It also
includes the monopolization of language, which is governed by state
mechanisms and institutions such as law, the school and the university
as the official language. At the same time, this is accompanied by a
process of universalization in which professional civil servants have
the prerogative of the universal just by monopolizing it. This process
of appropriation takes place as a concentration, setting and unification
with which the local, the regional and the scattered are placed under a
universal standard. At the same time, every individual within a
territory receives a state identity, is thus constructed as a citizen
and quantified and classified by means of state statistics. Bourdieu
writes: “The construction of the state as a relatively autonomous field,
exercising a power that brings about the centralization of physical
violence and symbolic violence, and thus constitutes a struggle, is
inextricably linked to the construction of a unified social space. which
is its territory. “These processes of unification are those of
language, measures, discourses, and speech. The state sector also
includes educational institutions, media, apparatuses and institutions
that initiate and operate ideological adaptation as well as objectifying
and quantifying mechanisms of counting, statistics and classification,
which have hegemonic validity in various social fields and for the
population are also common sense, by constructing everyday life as a
normal state, a daily life, to which one can trust apparently without
further ado. After all, the social metric that the state stages, and
which today ends in omnimetry, the obsession to quantify everything, is
always tied to the constellation, periodicity and intensity of class
struggles.
Permanent Government and ‘Deep State’
In the normal case, in which the population is fully integrated into the capitalist system, states react in short-term crisis processes with reforms and corresponding rhetoric, with the building up of crisis reserves in all areas as well as with economic intervention and political as well as military measures wherever the exploitation and the free flow of goods and capital within the value chain. For several years, in times of overlapping crisis processes, profound changes have taken place in the institutional structure, although this can maintain its facade to the outside. Starting with the parties: they are no longer the interest groups of different classes and represent them in parliament, but they are transformed into professional electoral associations for the self-replicating executive. Agamben calls this pure government action. The political parties are thus changing in their structure and function. The party leaders no longer sit in government because they are the representatives of their parties in parliament, but sit at the head of their parties because they are in government. In addition to the parties, the influence of informal bodies, private corporate lobbyists, non-elected supranational institutions and executive bodies, the strategic network of the state, of which the bloc is in power, has been transformed in recent years. This executes certain policy options through extralegal organs, practices, and transactions, which is discussed in terms such as “dep state” and “permanent government”. Considering that the administrative staff is independent of any change of government anyway, this is a dense network of government personnel, bureaucracy, secret services, the military, the informal organization of capital, multinational corporations, and the financial industry. This is under the political-economic dominance of the latter and the military protection of the armed formations. This is interesting inasmuch as on the one hand the financial capital transforms the state into a corporate form, whereby the respective balance of power between the state and the state must be taken into account (for example, the state itself is an economic actor, which as an issuer of government bonds to the government). On the other hand, the police in a broader sense plays a stronger role in the state apparatuses. It can be assumed that the financial capital and the large multinational companies through intensive lobbying and the mode of action markets, the states to follow the conditions of capital and to comply with their interests. Today, one could speak of global governance without sovereignty, but not without states. In this context, state fascization means that the state not only reacts to crises and conflicts but anticipates them and therefore follows a preventive logic, in particular by pursuing permanent and proactive crisis management both internally and externally. Prevention is initially a time scheme; something should be done before an adverse event occurs, assuming that future indicators can predict future undesirable conditions and events, that these predicted undesirable developments are unlikely to occur without the appropriate countermeasures, and thus promise the greatest possible risk minimization as early as possible. Prevention does not want to create, it wants to prevent. And you can never prevent enough and never early enough. All prevention attempts to prevent potential damage in the future, regardless of the strategy chosen. At its core, prevention means working on the virtual: it aims to direct becoming in its eventuality in order to avoid impending dangers. Future events that have not yet happened will have an undeniable presence in the present. Here we are dealing with a permanent securitization that constantly tracks down threat situations and risk factors in order to legitimize preventive action, and this is then enforced and can even extend to the liquidation of alleged people’s pests or class enemies. The logic of prevention is that of anticipated cleansing. In any case, prevention requires comprehensive data collection and processing (statistics and probability calculus) in order to both constitute and control the population and to translate uncertainties of any kind into a probable risk, in order to finally establish the security state. The various predictions construct the future precisely through the management of the subjects, which are themselves classified in risk categories. At this point overlap the financial system, more precisely, the credit economy, and preventive policialisation; just by marking the subjects as potential risks, one constantly produces new risk subjects in the present. Ultimately, everything can become a risk, which deviates from the given setpoint values or, to be more precise, what can be identified as the sign of such deviations. Thus, prevention itself becomes the engine of a repressive normalism, which also begins to pathologize any kind of deviations. Normalistic control mechanisms geared to the future are now beginning to override the laws and the existing normative regulations. Today, Big Data and other technologies allow the control and granularization of normality fields and norm values that can ever change. Who wants to prevent, must never stop controlling. Thus, prevention is not only about risk avoidance, but also about detailed risk management, which is both catastrophic and probabilistic. It follows, on the one hand, that one always starts from the worst possible and relies on the dispositive of fear, and, on the other hand, that a reversal of the burden of proof is necessary when making the risk. It is not the risk that has to be proven but that none exists.
Precisely in the wake of terrorism, so-called precautionary principles have been introduced, starting from the worst case scenarios and imagining all sorts of threats. The activism of prevention, so to speak, generates what it wants to combat, following a logic of a policy in the subjunctive. And when it comes to avoiding the worst, then almost everything is allowed. The prevention regime thus always revolves around the problem of the State’s state of emergency, which is now being put on a permanent basis. The right is at least partially suspended or constantly rewritten to avert alleged political events that could destroy the existing legal system. In the name of exceptionalism, the exceptional state claims the rule of life and death and radicalizes the mechanisms of disciplinary and post-disciplinary control. The anticipated catastrophe becomes the vehicle of protofascist security policies emanating from the state itself. (However, one can no longer think of the exceptional / security state solely in relation to the law because it is now the constitutive principle of governmentality.) While the juridical void may be unthinkable to the law, it is not a practice of power that is the law. It is not only the exception state, but the war machine of capital for which the security state is an apparatus or dispositive. State and war now became components of capital, entailing radical transformations of their functions and relations.)
Agamben has pointed out that for a long time now, reasons of security (raisons de sécurité) have taken the place of what used to be called the raison d’état. For Agamben stand thus a series of tendencies that result in the exceptional state, which is understood by him as a governmental technology, which lurks at the core of liberal democracy already the abolition of law. The first is to establish new relationships in the population, which consist of constant monitoring – hence the focus on institutions that allow complete control of individuals’ electronic and communication data. “The demand for transparency, in its exaggerated and ultimately totalitarian form, means that each and every one of us legitimately needs to be permanently reviewed, observed, classified and evaluated in all aspects of life.” At the same time, public participation in political life is becoming more and more important Participation in opinion polls reduced in the run-up to elections. This tendency is all the more disturbing for Agamben, as it has already been cast in theoretical form by Nazi jurists: they have defined the people as a politically impotent element whose protection the state must guarantee. Depoliticizing citizens can only mobilize them from their passivity by fearing a foreign enemy. A further tendency is an introduction to a state in which terrorism and security state enter into a symbiotic relationship: Thus, in the descriptions of terrorist crimes on factual security in the legal sense increasingly renounced.
The tendency of constant transformation
Thus, the novel structural state fascization does not arise exclusively as a reaction to social development trends and crisis processes but anticipates the coming economic, social and political crises and conflict potentials, which is also clearly stated in corresponding official statements. For this purpose, the state is developing a number of techniques, such as new control and monitoring instruments that record, accumulate and evaluate data, techniques for further quantification and surveying of the population and of such police and military nature. The transformation of the ordinary capital state into a fascist state. Today, therefore, this does not necessarily result from a spectacular break, but from the creeping but steadily driven accumulation, consolidation, and intensification of fascist measures. Above all, this includes the comprehensive militarization and access extension of the police within the framework of an ever-expanding security state, while limiting fundamental rights. Above all, the repressive apparatus always receives additional technical means, legal possibilities, and executive powers. Other measures include the amalgamation of the police and the military, as well as the police and intelligence services [(and also civilian and armed authorities); building on this the nationwide surveillance, [data collection and storage by the state services; and the increasing integration of the mass media into the ideological state apparatus, the criminalization of poverty while reducing the level of reproduction of the subaltern population, the cooperation of “security authorities” with domestic fascist and terrorist networks (and such militias abroad), and an increasingly aggressive and belligerent one future foreign policy. Evident is the tightening of laws, regulations, and directives up to the establishment of a fine criminal law and legally anchored access rights far in advance of concrete offenses – up to the preventive detention. On the other hand, however, the executive has been steadily advancing and anticipating this development: for example, the Pentagon and the CIA have been investigating torture for decades, and the so-called “white torture” and other methods were extensively tested extensively as early as the 1970s, while the torture ban still exists. Since 2001, there has been an exorbitant increase in extrajudicial executions abroad in the United States, mostly through drone strikes, but also by special forces, which are not preceded by any legal proceedings. When an unlawful practice becomes known, it usually does not result in their attitudes, but in their subsequent legalization or tacit acceptance. The boundaries of war, police operation and covert activity are becoming increasingly blurred. It comes to a legislative, and where this is not yet enforceable, operational erosion of the protective rights of the population towards the state while maintaining the formal-democratic superstructure.
State fascization and Open fascism
Here we follow the Marxist understanding of fascism as a form of bourgeois rule, in a sense its extreme form. In fascism, an external, strictly hierarchical organization gains dominance over the state apparatus and merges with it, whereby the economic system, which has fallen into crisis, is maintained and forcibly secured on a new level. The war machine is implanted in the state as a performative organizing principle, that is, the fascist state passes as an active system for the practice of open terror against the population, or their resistant and oppositional parts, over what it mobilizes other parts of the population. Fascism is also the harshest form of social exclusion. Propagandistically, the conceptions of the national community, of racism and of nationalism are brought into play against liberalism as a fundamental ideology. Fascism thus marks the transition from apparent peace to open war, it is the qualitative intensification and expansion of the counterrevolution and the class struggle that the ruling classes are constantly leading. At the same time, the masses are always mobilized as well. And if the masses are constituted as a nation, then this is a specific process that George Mosse has accurately described in his book One People, One Reich, One Leader. For Mosse, National Socialism is merely the borderline case of democracy, pushing the indoctrination of homogeneous collective ideas that are always observable in democracies to the extreme. The preaching of power is then akin to the irrationalism of a fascist mass policy, which in a sense makes a unity that exists only on paper palpable. The general will is presented as a collective emotion. The Nazis have extended the process of constructing a unity of emotion to a whole people and pushed it to the utmost of annihilation. It is a rapid increase in tendencies that can be found in certain democratic processes and ceremonies. Deleuze and Guattari have sharply criticized democracy in all their collaborations, usually calling them the cousin of totalitarianism. The nation now coalesces into the imaginary incarnation of the people, a national self-representation based on what unites the people: language, history, homeland, blood, etc. In contrast, today’s state fascization is not carried out mainly by a conspiracy between fascist organizations and the state, but rather a structural and sequential transformation of the political system and its apparatuses driven by the state itself. State fascization is thus not characterized by brown uniforms in the street scene and the takeover of the ministries by right-wing groups, but a tendency which is prepared and promoted in the ministries and apparatuses themselves.
Modern mass movement
Moreover, the structural state fascization also receives a new mass movement and social base of unimaginable proportions: its mass movement is the device connected to technical devices, permanently data-generating and self-mutually evaluating, as judged by government and commercial agencies, observed. verified and classified population. In the context of governmentality, which Foucault has so vividly described, the digitization of capitalist production processes has evolved comprehensive hegemonic quantification arrangements that serve as means of measuring, assessing, and comparing to processes of growth and outbidding in terms of profitability, efficiency, and transparency in all possible areas and lead to omnipresent quantification. Today, these structural processes (ranking, rating, scoring, screening, casting, etc.) are met with highly isolated dividends, […] while still simulating individuality, but precisely in this context, their active willingness to allocate data to the world Participation in quantification procedures and in general to demonstrate voluntary technical participation. Such participatory procedures not only foster the quantification mechanism but constantly intensify its effects, which not only consist in quantification itself and in numerical comparison but at the same time intensify the competition between the valued and valuers. On the one hand, the population is subjected to massive adjustment constraints and increasingly employed in the periods outside wage labor, on the other hand, it creates the basis for its own exploration, even doing free labor for capital. Quantification is part of an expansive capitalization and economization for the development of areas that have so far been deprived of the imperatives of capital exploitation. For the apparatuses, the data collected on this basis, which become commodities, i.e commodified and thus monetarily exploitable, also offer the possibility of improving the algorithmic procedures that are today means of hierarchizing information and individually influencing each individual. In addition to full biometric coverage, the repressive authorities are also interested in finding out as much as possible about each individual in order to eliminate any anonymity and predict future action on the basis of their data pool and be able to eliminate resistance at an early stage. That is, big data, whose technical basis is permanent monitoring, is equally significant for state and capital today.
World market and state governance
It is easy to see that as neo-liberal strategies are implemented, the state, in its role as a guarantor of social peace, is being increasingly restricted between classes, while the various modes of social police functioning are being intensified step by step, not only by the social police the repressive state organs are executed, but also requires new task forces, control techniques and governmental arts, which include civil society institutions, institutionally supported social technologies and a variety of evaluation mechanisms. You have to register, govern and freeze the population, but you also have to constantly mobilize them (racism). All in all, the state must increasingly ensure the control of the labor markets, the workforce, and the population more closely by the police. Why is that?
As we have briefly outlined, the present world imperialist system is constantly generating shifting friction between the imperialist nation-states, the financial system, and the multinationals. Today, the state in the capitalist core countries increasingly has to fulfill its role as social police, because globalization, at least in these countries, favors the stagnation of economic growth and thus weakens the possibility of pacifying the class conflict over the welfare state But social policing can only function effectively if, as a national collective (ideal) capitalist, it supports as much as possible the maintenance of economic internal growth. However, imperial globalization is increasingly eroding the conditions that allow the state to function both as social police (caring and repressive at the same time) and as a national, idealistic total capitalist.
Governments can not completely abandon their role as a national, idealized total capitalist, and they must seek to drive economic growth by all possible means, so as not to jeopardize the social cohesion of the capitalist social formation. But today there are a number of limitations. By continuing to execute the processes of liberalization and international competition, multinational and financial capital tends to exacerbate the economic depression of the real economy and impoverish populations, even in developed countries, and at least tend to reoccur in social conflicts so that today, for reasons of prevention and cybernetization alone, states must act more as social police. Although it should be assumed that the neoliberal strategies of labor flexibilization, creative work propaganda and libertarian singularization of cultural policies, especially among the middle classes, should be consistent with soft control systems, self-technologies and governance policies through social networks, mutual monitoring in the citizen factories This is not the case with psychologization and physiotherapy, urbanization and the event industry. Although these soft phenomena, techniques, and practices have not disappeared, quite the contrary, they are increasingly being overlaid by the mechanisms of social police. We use the notion of police as Foucault in a broad sense, as a repressive administrative system whose control systems penetrate deeply into the working and lifestyles of the population, as specific governance that does not, however, extend the state by expanding the privatized power system. and governmental techniques become increasingly meaningless or make him part of a network of governing bodies, as is the case with Foucault. The fact that many institutions and institutions of the state (schools, universities, hospitals, etc.) now function as private enterprises not only points to the weakening of the political autonomy of the state, but also requires a more intensive implementation of social police in the social field, moreover Governments can no longer pursue expansive fiscal policies, for example, to guarantee full employment or to maintain the welfare state at a level acceptable to the population. Governments can only respond to workfare policies in the domestic markets, which means that the state functions as a government social police are gaining immense importance. In the long phase of neo-liberal restructuring since the 1980s, the welfare state has gradually been replaced by the workfare state, i. a new political model of the ruling classes that transformed old social policies and subordinated them to the goal of making labor turnover in labor markets more flexible and restrictive, absorbing the decline in industrial employment through a low-wage service sector, and incomes redistribute in favor of profits and to the detriment of wages. The neoliberal austerity policy is a strategy to reduce the costs of businesses, in particular by reducing labor costs, increasing profits per unit of labor and thus increasing profit rates; it is accompanied by an economy of financialization (and institutional change) which increases the mobility of capital as well as the power of financial capital, managers and shareholders, while cutting social rights and wages to broad sections of the population even in metropolitan areas, a part of the population falls out of the official labor markets and has to be considered part of the global surplus population. Significantly, the ECB’s policy in the case of Greece has shown that for states that temporarily lack sufficient liquidity to service the holders of their government bonds, the drastic reduction of the welfare state is a necessary condition for their financial solvency. Greece is a laboratory in which the neoliberal experiment clearly shows itself, namely as the political governance of the civil civil war, which is fed by the debt crisis, accompanied by an alleged humanitarian regime of refugee control.
The contradiction that now exists at the global level between the freedom of movement of the promises of payment and the flows of money and the limited and regulated mobility of population flows requires, precisely in view of the latter, effective and efficient apparatus of control and regulation (differentiated migration policies) which is currently underway The specific reorganization of the state apparatuses may well have a fascist tendency, while the neo-fascisms, underpinned by right-wing populism, could in the last resort escape the control of the state and capital, since the state and capital are relative in the fields of civil war open to change. Especially the strategies of total economic war, which are currently being enforced with the means of financialization, leave the governments of many countries no other option than to comply with the structural adjustments, and these also include cold strategies that the IMF has pursued since the 1970s, especially in crisis countries , see Greece, implemented. Today, global financial accumulation is accompanied by a continuum of bloody and bloodless civil wars spreading from Europe to Turkey, the Middle East and Afghanistan. One can observe constant frictions and friction in the efforts of the state reorganization because the state must continue to function in its functions of the social police and weakened in that of the ideological total capitalist if in particular, the service for the multinational and financial enterprises is to be served. Conversely, multinational corporations need big powers to survive in world markets. A leading imperialist state, beyond its national policy, must be able to fulfill three functions of global governance (for the multinationals and the world economy as a whole): global sheriff, global banker, and driver of capital accumulation. These three functions are still dominated by the US today, albeit to an increasingly lesser extent. The leading imperialist state must perform the function of a global sheriff, which requires enormous military power (the US military budget is $ 716 billion in 2018), in particular to discipline those countries that are globalized and, ultimately, the US Try to resist US dominance and not easily open their markets to multinational capital. The second function is the role of the global banker, who owns and must use the entire arsenal of financial instruments, such as the implementation of a reserve currency, which serves as a reserve and reserve currency around the globe, including to ensure the maintenance of international payments and foreign reserves. The third function concerns the function of a driver of national and international capital accumulation and of economic growth: since capital accumulation, especially in emerging countries, but also in countries such as Germany and Japan, continues to be accelerated by exports, a strong economy must exist on the world market which can absorb huge amounts of imports and even grow by increasing their imports. So far, this has been the case with the United States, which has financed this procedure by expanding private and public debt. The size of GDP and its weight in world markets has allowed the US to implement expansive monetary and fiscal policies, which have been barely limited by external limits on world markets. The US can still finance its own trade deficit today because the dollar is the leading and reserve international currency. Under these conditions, the expansionary monetary policy of the US leads to the creation of aggregate demand for its own people and the rest of the world. The possibility of an almost limitless expansion of the Fed’s supply of money also allows it to spend the necessary military expenditures to continue to play the role of global sheriff. Finally, the implementation of these three functions serves, above all, to satisfy the interests of multinational capital. Therefore, one should speak here of globalized governance without sovereignty, whereby the power potentials of the imperialist states, especially the United States, by no means dissolve into nothingness. The relationship between the state and capital today leads to friction between the geopolitical ambitions of states and the economic interests of multinational capital. Thus, the geopolitical ambitions of the major powers generate inter-state rivalries, while multinational corporations need a pacification of state rivalries, the smoothest possible regular performance of the three functions of governance, and the use of the economic and military power of the major imperialist states to keep the world markets open and in particular to discipline peripheral countries. The dominance of multinational corporations partly realizes the capitalist utopia of a minimal state, which by no means implies its absence, but merely reduces the potency of the state to the national idealistic capitalist, while at the same time supporting the operations of the large multinational corporations and finance by means of intensification of role of the local social policeman.
The aggressive strategies of capital and its representatives today include influencing politicians through lobbying and monetary support and control of the parties. This happens most intensively in the developed countries, where important parts of the organization of multinational companies are located. There are often close personal connections between the government staff and the representatives of the companies. In the US, this interconnectedness has progressed so much that many observers speak of the dominance of the capital representative over the leading state personnel. In peripheral countries, where multinational companies have outsourced parts of their manufacturing facilities, there are two main ways to exert political pressure on governments, with the first strategy being driven by negotiations, especially when it comes to foreign investment and technology transfer and the second strategy is simply threatening to withdraw investments. Many of these countries are still largely cut off from industrial production and therefore are simply hungry for capital. Insofar as these countries compete fiercely for foreign investment and even lack the financial resources to invest, they are particularly likely to be dominated by the multinationals to which they must offer favorable access to their domestic markets: low wages, legalization of Super-exploitation, environmental policies to externalize the cost of air pollution and favorable tax conditions.
Where capital accumulation is threatened as such, as was the case after the 2008 crisis, the governments of the core countries have no alternative but to recuperate the accumulation of capital by all possible means, otherwise they themselves operate In the epoch of fictional and speculative capital, this means nothing more than the massive support of the financial system and at the same time the promotion of austerity policies. The leftist idea of a revival of the Keynesian regulatory and welfare state is now without foundation. While it is true that in countries that are still among the few winners of the crisis, such as Germany, some social standards and even enforce individual welfare state reforms (minimum wage), but their punctual character and their very limited effect point to a comprehensive reformist Program of the Left today no basis exists anymore. And since the causes for this are to be found in the historical dynamics and the crisis logic of capital itself on a global level, this basis cannot be renewed by any attempt to strengthen national sovereignty. In general, it can be said that the state can achieve capital primarily through money, which always implies a delay, so that the state can never operate in the real-time of capital and can not catch up with it, such as Keynesian policies in politics which, in order to remedy the problem of accumulation, should lead to an increase in the aggregated demand, also find their limit under this aspect. In the phase of the dominance of financial capital, in which the dynamics of monetary capital flows shifted to the financial markets in the absence of adequate rates of profit in the real economy, not only the state and politics have largely become dependent variables of financial capital but also parts of the financial capital industrial capital. While the fictive and speculative capital invested in the financial system circulates around the globe in a matter of seconds, industrial locations, despite transnational production structures, digitized logistics chains and flexible supply networks, cannot be shifted in real time or, to put it another way, while accumulation of the Since the world market has become an immediate environment for financial capital, which can be traversed in nanoseconds, parts of the industrial capital and the middle capital remain limited to the national territory, despite the principle of exportability. This type of reduction also affects the state and politics in their actions and accessibility, which are largely confined to national territory and therefore in a structural position of dependence on multinational capital and finance. It is true that the state is by no means determined by capital in all its decision-making powers, and just as long as capital accumulates at a certain level and at the same time promotes overall economic growth in one country, it still possesses action capacities.
The international financial system under the dominance of the US financial industry controls today the globalized production, the transnational division of labor (global production networks) and also state policies, which in relation to the latter leads to new demarcations, restructurings and interactions of political activities, while the finance itself any effective regulation escapes even at the level of domestic markets. But the global uncertainty, which is capped by financial capital, is creating the conditions and the need for the security governance of the present capitalist states. With every sign of exhaustion of the economic system, instability appears as a permanent phenomenon to which one reacts with the militarization/technologization of the state apparatus. All of the state’s reconstructions and reorganizations are now economically and financially over-shaped, but conversely, the management of money capital still requires centralized institutions that can make efficient decisions to repair unstable situations. The social impact of neoliberalism, in the context of its self-fulfilling prophecy of calculating and monetizing the risks, is to maintain and at the same time control a situation of general insecurity by maximizing population-wide strategies of creating fear and insecurity at the same time as the economic conditions of certain parts of the population continue to worsen (as a punishment of inadequate treatment of risks). It is about a new governance of civil warfare, which is led by constant security campaigns against allegedly sweating from all pore uncertainty, the old sovereignty of the state is not restored, but a state of flexibilized biopolitics and social police is created Although soft forms of social peace are still being created (urban politics, cultural institutions, care places, etc.), these are accompanied by warlike thanatotic policies in which the population still functions as an object of biopolitics only insofar as it does not adhere to the logic of cybernated capital repressive policies of the state, so that there is no longer any difference between the time of peace and that of war. This type of peaceful war is fractal, i. The war reproduces itself indefinitely and always with the same model, but under different modalities and at different levels of reality.
The relative loss of nation-state sovereignty, its subordination to the economic and financial policies of big capital, the reduction of parliaments to law-enforcement agencies, and new forms of governance have intensified in their interpenetration and multifaceted aspects since the 1970s; the legal-political model of the state and its Keynesian policies no longer allowed it after the global crisis of 1973 to cushion or even steer economic crisis processes, so that the neoliberal strategies of capital, which also reconfigure the modalities of the organization, the government and the administration of states implied that they did not come from nothing. It should be remembered that the Keynesian-inspired economic policy interventions were not based on the sovereignty of the nation-states from the outset but could be relatively sovereign enforced only due to the based on industrial mass work and mass consumption Fordism. translated by Dejan Stojkovski