The State at the Heart of Capitalism: Marxist Theory and Foucault’s Lectures on Governmentality

Introduction

Although made up of wide-ranging and often opposed currents, Marxist state theory has a tendency to treat the modern state as a distinctly political organ disaggregated, relatively speaking, from the economic structure of society. A classic statement in this respect may be found in Poulantzas’ celebrated work State, Power, Socialism:

It [the bourgeois state] is, in fact, a specialized and centralized apparatus of a peculiarly political nature, comprising an assemblage of impersonal, anonymous functions whose form is distinct from that of economic power … The specificity of the modern State therefore refers precisely to the relative separation of the political from the economic, and to the entire reorganization of its respective spaces and fields implied by the total dispossession of the direct producer in capitalist relations of production. (Poulantzas, 1978: 54; see also Poulantzas, 1978: 18)

Such characterizations capture something real and distinctive in need of explanation. Indeed, Marx himself specifically observed, ‘the abstraction of the political state is a modern product’ (Marx, 1975: 90; see also Marx, 1975: 219). That said, certain abstractions can also be deceptive, stealing attention away from deeper social content. The abstraction of the political state, disaggregated, or indeed standing above civil society, is one such conceptual approximation which has steered Marxist scholarship away from theorizing those dimensions of capitalism’s productive structure that function through the modern state’s political and juridical forms. Yet Marx was not seduced by the former appearance, and planned to devote a volume of Capital to the critical role state power plays in the capitalist mode of production (see Heinrich, 2012). Time, however, escaped him. Since Marx’s death a reluctance among his students to widen the boundaries of Capital – with honourable exceptions – has blunted efforts to theorize the specific way state power is organized under capitalism, and how it mediates the processes and tendencies conceptualized in Capital’s first three volumes.

On that note, this paper will critically examine two tracts of scholarship that offer a foundation upon which to think about the possible orientation of Marx’s missing volume on the state. The first tract, prompted by a number of important works by Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner, pinpoints critical changes in the relations of production that accompanied the transition to capitalism, and their subsequent impact on the organization of state power. It will be argued that this analysis identifies fundamental historical changes which help explain ‘the abstraction of the political state’. However, it will also be suggested that the authors’ reluctance to go beyond Capital prevents them from approximating productive content which places the practices and rationalities constitutive of the modern state at the very core of capitalism’s economic structure.

With that in mind, the second part of this paper will explore a potential starting point for such a theoretical programme, looking in particular at Foucault’s late lectures delivered at the Collège de France. In these lectures Foucault argues that the transition to capitalism fundamentally alters the organizing schema of state power. Labelled governmentality by Foucault, this new organizing schema is distinguished from its predecessors by emergent practices and rationalities designed to stimulate, steer and manage the frenetic flows of wealth and people prompted by industrialization, and the internationalization of the economy. It will be suggested that Foucault’s exegesis on governmentality offers important insights into productive processes organized in and through the modern state, which build upon and extend Marx’s theory of the capitalist mode of production. To demonstrate the more muscular materialist analyses that can be built through absorbing Foucault into a Marxist cannon, the article will conclude by employing a governmentality framework to critique certain patrimonial readings of the Papua New Guinea state.

‘The Abstraction of the Political State’ and the Transition to Capitalism

Broadly inspired by Robert Brenner’s writings on the transition to capitalism (Brenner, 1985a, 1985b, 1986), over the past two decades a number of Marxist scholars have challenged the ‘foundational myth of IR’, which couples the modern state-system’s birth to the Peace of Westphalia (Teschke and Lacher, 2007: 573). Initially set in motion by Wood (1991, 2002) and Rosenberg (1994), this tract of Marxist scholarship has been advanced more recently by Teschke (2003) and Lacher (2006). Uniting these scholars is a general view that the European state-system of the 17th and 18th centuries was fundamentally dynastic in character. The capitalist state, it is suggested, only began to emerge in England during this period. It was not until the 19th and 20th centuries that the capitalist state-system (the modern state-system), and the mode of production it presupposes (capitalism), generalized across Europe and indeed the world. In order to substantiate this thesis, the above authors define some of the specific properties which distinguish this new type of state from its predecessors, and the mediated link between these properties and certain elementary changes in the relations of production.

To that end, they begin their historical analysis by tracing the modality of sovereign power which evolved during the feudal and absolutist epochs. In contrast to capitalism, it is argued, the immediate producer under feudalism ‘had direct access to the means of their own reproduction and to the land itself’ (Wood, 2002: 95; see also Brenner, 1985b: 232). Nevertheless, they did not have unmediated access – the peasantry was obliged to provide a series of services and/or payments to a land-holding class of nobles. Yet, it is noted, without some form of compulsion the nobility’s feudal rights were unenforceable (Brenner, 1986: 28; Lacher, 2006: 66). Teschke (2003: 58) explains, ‘mere property rights to land were meaningless … because peasants possessed their means of subsistence and were therefore under no internal compulsion to rent from or work for the lord’.

Feudal property rights, of course, were not accumulated in isolation. Rather, as both Lacher (2006: 65) and Teschke (2003: 58) point out, they were always married to a share in sovereign power. ¹ Indeed, the capacity to control a specified territory, make and enforce laws, monopolize privileges, and organize/employ armed force were essential mediations that allowed lords to enforce feudal obligations and seize a portion of the wealth produced by peasant households (Teschke, 2003: 53). This wealth, in turn, could be used to swell the lord’s political, military, and administrative capacity vis-à-vis the peasantry and other lords, thus facilitating increases in the rate of exploitation and the expansion of land holdings. As a result of these mutually reinforcing tendencies, Wood et al. observe that the distribution and accumulation of sovereign power constituted a site of intense intra-class struggle within the aristocracy (Brenner, 1985a: 31–2; Brenner, 1985b: 238; Brenner, 1986: 27; Lacher, 2006: 66; Wood, 1991: 60–1). ² What arose from this class dynamic was a mode of personalized sovereign power relations rooted in subjugation, allegiance, alliance, political competition, and political accumulation; these forces made feudal state formation a tenuous and temporal affair (Teschke, 2003: 63).

In the wake of the 14th-century crisis – where the population of Europe was decimated by ‘soil exhaustion, bad harvests, the Black Death, and a marked decline in agricultural productivity’ (Teschke, 2003: 96; see also Brenner, 1985a: 20) – Wood et al. argue that this system of exploitation was recalibrated following successful peasant struggles for property rights and personal freedoms (Brenner, 1985a: 35–6; Lacher, 2006: 68). In regions such as France this struggle led to a centralization of sovereign power under the king, who formed tactical alliances with the peasantry (Lacher, 2006: 69; Teschke, 2003: 107–8). However, these alliances did not extinguish the nobility; rather, in order to consolidate the king’s rule, state offices were privatized and sold to the aristocracy and the pre-capitalist bourgeoisie.

Teschke (2003: 168) observes, ‘the state’s extractive apparatus provided new opportunities for a defeudalized nobility in the form of venal offices’ (see also Lacher, 2006: 74; Wood, 1991: 22–3). Thus, he argues, during this period we witness in Western Europe a transition from the feudal state, where sovereign power was ‘territorially fragmented, decentralized, personalized, and only loosely held together through bonds of vassalage’ (Teschke, 2003: 63), to the ‘dynastic-patrimonial state’ (Teschke, 2003: 191). While the dynastic-patrimonial state is distinguished by the centralization of sovereign power, it is not yet a system of ‘generalized impersonal rule’ (Lacher, 2006: 76). Rather, as Wood (2002: 79–80) explains, ‘office in the central state served as an economic resource for many members of the dominant classes, as a means of extracting surplus labour in the form of taxes from peasant producers’. Consequently, Lacher (2006: 75–6) suggests the rise of the absolutist state was not a ‘victory of a rational state geared to the pursuit of public interest’ but was the apex of ‘generalized personal domination that remained necessarily riddled by privilege and particularism’.

However, the antecedents of a new political system were taking root during this period in England, although the origins of this transformation extend back to the Norman Conquest (Wood, 1991: 9). Teschke (2003: 104–6) observes:

Post-Conquest England, in striking contrast to Capetian France, was a uniquely centralized, internally organized, and socially homogenous feudal state … The ‘king’s peace’ predicated on the power of the ban, minimized private feuding by providing recognized institutions for settling disputes over land, property and privileges among the Anglo-Norman ruling class. (see also Wood, 1991: 27–8; Wood, 2002: 98–9)

Following the 14th-century crisis, this particular combination of a strong feudal state – underpinned by the centralization of sovereign power in the king – and secure domestic lordship assumes particular significance. Lacher (2006: 69) notes, ‘during the crisis of feudalism, English serfs were able to achieve personal freedom. They were unable, however, to gain property rights to the lands they occupied; these were understood to be the property of their former manorial lords’ (see also Teschke, 2003: 250–1). Consequently the English aristocracy, unlike their continental counterparts, were in a position where they could look to increased rents as a means of sustaining their class existence, especially given that property in the state was not a historical option available to them (Brenner, 1985a: 55; Lacher, 2006: 69–71; Wood, 2002: 117; Wood, 2003: 76–7). Accordingly, the aristocracy’s wealth was increasingly tied to a market in leases, where incomes could be generated by renting land to the highest bidder (Lacher, 2006: 71; Wood, 2002: 100–1); a process that, in turn, fostered a new breed of tenant farmer who had to ‘produce efficiently enough to pay both wages and economic rents in order to keep their leaseholds, and, by outbidding other tenants, to expand their holdings in order to make additional efficiency profits’ (Lacher, 2006: 71).

It is argued by Wood et al. that the growing market dependence of both tenants and landlords generated a form of compulsion which inspired new social practices rooted in the accumulation of capital. Wood (2002: 100–1) observes:

As more land came under this economic regime, advantage in access to the land itself would go to those who could produce competitively and pay good rents by increasing their own productivity. This meant that success would breed success, and competitive farmers would have increasing access to even more land, while others lost access altogether.

Accordingly, land was gradually cleared of its customary occupants to make way for large holdings, while those traditional peasant farmers who remained were pushed to the wall by more efficient capitalist tenant-farmers (Lacher, 2006: 71; Marx, 1973: 769; Marx, 1976: 895; Wood, 2002: 54).

As a result of this process of expropriation an itinerant population emerged, and formed part of a growing urbanized wage-labour force. This development, Wood (2002: 103) claims, amplified demand for ‘cheap consumer goods’ which were being circulated through an increasingly unified national market that centred upon London (Wood, 2002: 103). This latter shift, in particular, helped to drive ‘the process of industrialization in England’ (Wood, 2002: 143), bulwarked by rising agricultural productivity (Brenner, 1985a: 54; see also Wood, 2002: 133–8). Consequently, Wood (2002: 102) suggests, ‘unfixed, variable rents responsive to market imperatives … in England stimulated the development of commodity production, the improvement of productivity, and self-sustaining economic development’.

Of course, lying at the heart of this seismic shift in the economic terrain of England were elementary changes in the relations of production. A new social opposition of sorts was gradually forming. On one side stands the capitalist, who enjoys exclusive possession of the means of production (decoupled from sovereign power), on the other the worker (Marx, 1973: 463–4). ‘Freed’ from the means of production through a process that is ‘written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire’ (Marx, 1976: 875), the latter party is forced to sell their labour-power in order to obtain the means of subsistence (Marx, 1981: 958; Poulantzas, 1978: 18). According to Wood et al. this is a critical historical shift with important social implications.

No longer does the immediate producer need to be cajoled into providing surplus through the application of sovereign power (though under capitalism it certainly remains an optional lever), instead their market-dependence acts as the necessary disciplinary mechanism. Rosenberg (1994: 124, emphasis added) observes in this respect, ‘what binds them [the immediate producer] to the process of surplus extraction is no longer political command, but rather the requirement to sell their labour in order to gain this subsistence’. Similarly, the capitalist – who, like their historical predecessors, face intense intra-class competition – no longer feuds with rivals; rather, it is through the market, using fair (efficiency/cunning) or foul (fraud/corruption/monopolization) means, that competition for extracted surplus value takes place. Wood (2002: 96) notes in this respect, ‘only in capitalism is … surplus labour … appropriated by purely “economic” means’. Thus, what in essence is being pinpointed here then is the development of a new generalized medium and lever, i.e. market-dependency/competition, which mediates the extraction and distribution of surplus from the immediate producer to a ruling class.

The emergence of this lever – which is intrinsically bound to a new set of productive relations – deprives sovereign power of the function it possessed under feudal and absolutist regimes. ‘The moment of coercion’ and the ‘moment of appropriation’ have now become, Wood (2002: 172) notes, ‘allocated between two distinct but complementary “spheres”’. This provokes a ‘profound transformation’ in the nature of sovereign power (Lacher, 2006: 97). Teschke (2003: 256) argues:

Since ruling-class power in capitalist-societies is based on private property and control over the means of production, ‘the state’ is no longer required to interfere directly into processes of production and extraction. Its central function is confined to the internal maintenance and external defence of a private property regime. This entails legally enforcing what are now civil contracts among politically (though not economically) free and equal citizens subject to civil law. This, in turn, requires a public monopoly over the means of violence, enabling the development of an ‘impartial’ public bureaucracy. Political power and especially the monopoly over the means of violence now come to be pooled in a deprivatized state above society and the economy. (see also Lacher, 2006: 37; Poulantzas, 1978: 18; Rosenberg, 1994: 125–6; Wood, 1991: 24)

Thus, by allowing ‘civil society to become autonomous from the state’ (Lacher, 2006: 97), capitalism creates the conditions in which ‘a “purely political” state’ – one devoid of privilege and particularism – can come into being ‘abstracted from the exploitation of surplus’ (Lacher, 2006: 107).

However, the argument of the above authors goes further than this. They claim that the elementary social changes which evoke this dichotomy of the ‘political state’ and ‘civil society’ also produce an inversion of sorts. Agricultural production, industry, trade, and finance, elements of civil society that were once subordinate to the dictates of sovereign power, under capitalism are no longer tied to political property. Instead, it is the dictates of capital which assume dominance. Completing the inversion, a ‘hollowed out’ modality of sovereign power – organized through the ‘political state’ – becomes subordinate to the rhythms of the economic realm, from which its revenues are drawn and legitimacy tied (Lacher, 2006: 109; see also Block, 1977). According to Wood (1991: 24), ‘the supremacy of “civil society”, of “economic” forms over political or military [forms] … is a defining characteristic of capitalism itself, which distinguishes it from other social forms’ (see also Lacher, 2006: 72; Wood, 1991: 28).

So, to summarize, woven into the historical scholarship of Wood et al. are three essential points that go some way towards explaining key features of the capitalist state system. First, they argue, mediating capitalist relations of production is an objective disciplinary mechanism, market dependence. This renders coercion a contingent rather than necessary factor, as far as the process of exploitation is concerned. We thus have here a social mechanism for sustaining an ‘independent’, self-regulating economic sphere. Second, they suggest that the dislocation of sovereign power from the immediate process of exploitation provokes a fundamental ‘restructuration of the relations of sovereignty’ (Lacher, 2006: 97). No longer a device for enforcing feudal or patrimonial rights, the instrumentalities of sovereign power assume a public form. Third, this depersonalized mode of sovereign power undergoes an inversion of sorts. No longer bound to a process of political accumulation, it is gradually subordinated to the private metabolism of the economy, which it administers and preserves. This gives the state its specifically managerial function.

One advantage of the thesis developed by Wood et al. is that it clearly demarks indicia which distinguish the capitalist state from its predecessors, and then links these indicia to historic shifts in the relations of production. As a result, we are able to pinpoint critical changes in the organization of sovereign power that help explain ‘the abstraction of the political state’. On the other hand, Wood et al. never attempt to push the theoretical boundaries of Capital, in order to chart processes critical to the capitalist mode of production which are organized through the modern state. In essence, their thesis is a negative one – i.e. the divorce of the immediate producer from the objective conditions of production, and the disciplinary effect of market-dependence, deprives the feudal/absolutist state of its exploitative content, thus inspiring the emergence of a political state geared towards the stewardship of existing social arrangements. What is lacking here is an attempt to conceptualize how state power is reorganized under capitalism, and the historically distinct way it is interweaved into the process of production; a way, of course, that sets it apart from feudal and absolutist regimes yet without making the modern state any less vital to the everyday functioning of the capitalist mode of production. In the absence of such a conceptual programme we are bound to see the modern state as standing above the economic structure of society – even if intrinsically coupled to it – rather than at its very centre, managing, regulating and organizing capital accumulation. It is at this moment that the late work of Foucault offers corrective guidance.

Interestingly, the historical emergence of a political state and its subordination to civil society forms an important point of departure for Foucault’s critique of state theory. ‘The state’, Foucault (2007: 350) observes, ‘has responsibility for a society, a civil society, and the state must see to the management of this civil society’. However, he takes this argument a step further than Wood et al. To that end, Foucault (2003: 249) claims:

It is as though power, which used to have sovereignty as its modality or organizing schema, found itself unable to govern the economic and political body of a society that was undergoing both a demographic explosion and industrialization. So much so that far too many things were escaping the old mechanism of the power of sovereignty, both at the top and at the bottom, both at the level of detail and at the mass level.

Accordingly, Foucault argues that sovereign power was not simply removed of its productive content, as Wood et al. suggest; rather, he claims, the transition to capitalism inspired a new range of problems and dynamics which sees state power reorganized on an entirely new basis. Foucault labels this new modality of state power ‘governmentality’. On that note, we will now examine Foucault’s late writings on governmentality in more detail, looking in particular at how this modality of power mediates the unstable social processes through which capital accumulates.

Foucault’s Critique of State Theory

To begin, a brief remark on Foucault’s methodology is needed in order to help situate his particular abstractive focus. Like Marx, Foucault is critical of empiricist methodologies which fetishize immediately perceived forms and processes, while allowing more elusive social forces to escape scrutiny. Consequently, his lectures refer critically to traditions of state theory – including Marxism – which take as their focus the state as an institutional ensemble. In opposition to this approach, Foucault suggests that the evolving state apparatus should be understood as a fluid episode in the organization of power. He argues, ‘the state is only an episode in government, and it is not government that is an instrument of state. Or at any rate, the state is an episode in governmentality’ (Foucault, 2007: 248). Consequently, analytical emphasis must be placed on the practices, rationalities and knowledge forms, through which power relations function and are expressed. This, Foucault (2008: 2–3) argues, constitutes a methodological inversion of empiricist approaches to state theory:

I would like to point out straightaway that choosing to talk about or to start from governmental practice is obviously and explicitly a way of not taking as a primary, original, and already given object, notions such as the sovereign, sovereignty, the people, subjects, the state, and civil society, that is to say, all those universals employed by sociological analysis, historical analysis, and political philosophy in order to account for real governmental practice. For my part, I would like to do exactly the opposite and, starting from this practice as it is given, but at the same time as it reflects on itself and is rationalized, show how certain things – state and society, sovereign and subjects, etcetera – were actually able to be formed, and the status of which should obviously be questioned.

In line with this approach, we will now examine the particular practices, rationalities, and knowledge forms which Foucault argues are constitutive of governmental power, beginning first with practice.

Governmental practice is broken down by Foucault into aims, technique and object. These different dimensions are not, however, accorded equal weight. The object of governmental practice stands out as a determination whose character stimulates governmental aims and techniques. To articulate the object of governmental power, Foucault employs an idiosyncratic term. It is ‘the population’, he argues, which governmental practice targets (Foucault, 2007: 105). In Foucault’s usage this phrase has a distinctive historical meaning. It is not ‘a collection of juridical subjects in an individual or collective relationship with a sovereign will’; a dynamic typical of absolutist and feudal regimes (Foucault, 2007: 74). The population, rather, is an aggregate unit made up of private individuals who operate independently of the state. This autonomous whole, according to Foucault, possesses its own ‘laws of transformation and movement’ (Foucault, 2007: 351), ‘its own regularities’ (Foucault, 2007: 104), its own ‘internal mechanisms of regulation’ (Foucault, 2007: 352). Put simply, as civil society disaggregates itself from forms of ‘political’ subjugation through a process of historical struggle, it increasingly appears to be a distinct unit in and of itself possessing a peculiar temperament that can be studied and understood, and to which power can be applied.

On occasions, Foucault uses the phrase ‘economy’ interchangeably with ‘the population’ (see, for example, Foucault, 2007: 95, 105). However, this emerging field of intervention, or object, is not adequately captured by the term economy, at least in its popular usage. Of course, economic processes are a vital feature of the population, i.e. production, exchange, international trade, investment, labour-supply, unemployment, etc. However, from the vantage point of the state other processes and regularities also appear important, such as public health, birth rates, crime levels, migration patterns, urban spread, etc. (Foucault, 2003: 242–3). Indeed, all these processes have their peculiar rhythms and tendencies, which governments can know and affect in particular ways. Consequently, the population as a concept goes further than economy, it captures the complex intersection between economic processes and what Foucault calls the ‘“biopolitics” of the human race’ (Foucault, 2003: 243).

With the emergence of the population ‘as a sort of technical-political object of management and government’ (Foucault, 2007: 70), Foucault argues that the techniques of rule experience paradigmatic change. Facing a field of intervention endowed with its own internal mechanisms of regulation – illuminated, as we will shortly see, through the science of economics/political economy – governments must learn to ‘respect these natural processes, or at any rate to take them into account, get them to work, or to work with them’ (Foucault, 2007: 352). ³ As a result, state power no longer functions through ‘regulatory systems of injunctions, imperatives, and interdictions’ (Foucault, 2007: 352); rather, it works on and through the natural processes constitutive of the population, by shaping the regulatory, social, spatial, cultural, and jurisdictional milieus through which these processes function (Foucault, 2007: 74–5). In a sense, governments stimulate and steer rather than command (Foucault, 2007: 74–5). ‘It is not a matter of imposing a law on men’, Foucault explains, but ‘of employing tactics rather than laws, or, of as far as possible employing laws as tactics’ (Foucault, 2007: 99). He adds in a later lecture: ‘The essential objective of this [governmental] management will be not so much to prevent things as to ensure that the necessary and natural regulations [intrinsic to the population] work, or even to create regulations that enable natural regulations to work’ (Foucault, 2007: 353). Of course, the latter reference to ‘work’ invites the question, to what end is governmental power to be directed?

Foucault (2007: 99) responds, ‘the end of sovereignty is internal to itself and gets its instruments from itself in the form of law’; on the other hand, ‘the end of government is internal to the things it directs (diriger); it is to be sought in the perfection, maximization, or intensification of the processes it directs’ (emphasis from original). By perfecting these processes, Foucault (2007: 99) argues, governments can provoke ‘specific finalities’ at the level of the population, including, for example, the production of ‘the greatest possible amount of wealth’ and the provision of ‘sufficient means of subsistence’. Accordingly, he observes: ‘Population will appear above all as the final end of government [in addition to its means] … [that is] to improve the condition of the population, to increase its wealth, its longevity, and its health’ (Foucault, 2007: 105).

Mediating the relationship between these finalities and the population’s internal processes is a certain problem. Foucault calls it the ‘problem of circulation … circulation in the very broad sense of movement, exchange, and contact, as form of dispersion, and also as form of distribution, the problem being: How should things circulate or not circulate?’ (Foucault, 2007: 64). The challenge becomes one of ‘allowing circulations to take place … ensuring things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out’ (Foucault, 2007: 65). In other words, if a series of desirable finalities are to be achieved, governmental power must allow the complex arterial systems through which everyday social metabolism functions – e.g. established and emerging flows of money, credit, trade, people, transport, technology, etc. – to circulate and calibrate. This, Foucault (2008: 64–68) notes, may demand a ‘formidable body of legislation and an incredible range of governmental interventions … Roosevelt’s welfare policy, for example, starting from 1932, was a way of guaranteeing and producing more freedom in a dangerous situation of unemployment: freedom to work, freedom of consumption, political freedom, and so on’. And, of course, governmental interventions designed to generate such ‘freedoms’ might include the strategic use of violence.

It is important to add a critical Marxist caveat to the above point. While Marxism takes the rapid circulation of people, resources and wealth in their different concrete forms, and indeed certain freedoms (in a historically precise sense), to be essential features of capitalism, equally it also understands that these processes are intrinsically linked to the dynamics of capital accumulation. The latter point is not given serious consideration by Foucault, but if his approach is to merge with Marxist theory, it is a vital connection to make. Indeed, as Harvey (2010: vi) notes in a recent volume on the global financial crisis, when capital is either no longer able or willing to accumulate in a particular space, owing to certain barriers or periodic crisis, ‘daily life can no longer go on in the style to which we have become accustomed’ (see also Harvey, 1982: 97; Marx, 1978: 183); money stops circulating, investment halts, consumption drops, infrastructure falls into disrepair, unemployment rises, etc. Accordingly, if governmental interventions are to allow ‘circulation to take place’ they must stimulate the pulse behind social metabolism. In other words, capital must be free to profit and expand. In this sense it may be said that the organization of governmental power is intrinsically linked to the accumulation of capital, but in a mediated rather than instrumental fashion.

Thus far we have examined the object, method and aims of governmentality, however we have yet to consider how this modality of power is rationalized. This forms an important preoccupation for Foucault. He notes, in this respect, that as governmentality is concerned with perfecting and calibrating processes intrinsic to the population – in order to achieve certain finalities – the paramount question for practitioners is no longer am I ruling justly (Foucault, 2008: 17), it is rather ‘am I governing at the border between too much and too little, between the maximum and minimum fixed for me by the nature of things’ (Foucault, 2008: 19). This is a self-conscious rationality which evaluates power’s application by the reverberated effects it has on the functioning of the population. Foucault argues that this evaluation is made according to the criteria of ‘truth’, using the market as a site of veridiction (Foucault, 2008: 32). In other words, ‘inasmuch as it enables production, need, supply, demand, value, and price, etcetera, to be linked together through exchange, the market constitutes … a site of verification-falsification for governmental practice’ (Foucault, 2008: 32). Indeed, markets register circulatory irregularities or imbalances in very precise ways, and thus provide state managers with objective measures that gauge whether they have governed correctly according to the ‘nature of things’, or whether they have failed to act or have acted too much.

This regime of truth, Foucault argues, bonds government to particular forms of knowledge. He specifically points to the relationship that has formed between government and political economy/economics:

Political economy is indeed a science, a type of knowledge (savoir), a mode of knowledge (connaissance) which those who govern must take into account … [That is] economics is a science lateral to the art of governing. One must govern with economics, one must govern alongside economists, one must govern by listening to the economists. (Foucault, 2008: 286)

Indeed, by approximating the ‘processes that link together variations of wealth and variation of population on three axes: production, circulation, consumption’, Foucault (2007: 350) claims, political economy/economics helps illuminate for government the intelligible mechanisms which regulate the population’s aggregate tendencies (Foucault, 2007: 350). As a result, ‘there is the … possibility of … governmental action limiting itself by reference to the nature of what it does and of that on which it is brought to bear’ (Foucault, 2008: 17).

So far we have broadly examined core features of the conceptual framework Foucault uses to articulate governmental power, i.e. practice, technique and knowledge. In certain respects, Foucault shares key historical understandings with Wood et al. Specifically, his analysis critically takes the modern distinction between the political state and civil society as its point of departure. However, unlike the latter authors he does not believe that the ‘restructuration of the relations of sovereignty’ fully explains this modern dichotomy (Lacher, 2006: 97). Rather, he suggests that state power is organized according to an entirely new schema, which causes it to function in a remarkably different way. Indeed, far from assuming a custodial posture, under this new organizing schema state power intervenes into every aspect of social life, which in turn profoundly affects how material reproduction takes place. With that latter point in mind, the following section will examine in more detail how this schema of power may be conceived as intrinsic to, and a critical part of, the capitalist mode of production, which Marx takes as his object in Capital.

Governmentality and the Capitalist Mode of Production

To begin, two important aspects of Marx’s scientific framework need clarification. The first point of clarification centres upon the distinction between ‘economics’ and ‘politics’. For Marx (1971: 20–1), the ‘economic structure of society’ denotes the totality of productive relations which mediate material metabolism between human beings, and of course the natural world (see also Marx, 1973: 489). In this respect, Marx adopts a refreshingly flexible understanding of production. To use one brief example, in his notes on pre-capitalist social formations, Marx (1973: 474–6) conceptualizes the schemas of power that operated in early human communities. In particular, he looks at the critical role nascent state power plays in organizing surplus labour time, principally through warfare, so as to increase the clan-community’s productive forces (i.e. via the expansion of territory), in the face of internal and external pressures. Here the organization of power – in a precise historical form – is a critical feature of the productive terrain (see also Marx, 1973: 227). Accordingly, it may be said then that if ‘economics’ captures the complex historical structures that organize production in the broad sense described here, ‘politics’ in Marx’s usage references the realm where humans become conscious of their material life and, as he puts it, ‘fight it out’ (Marx, 1971: 21). Political struggle, therefore, encompasses the rich forms of social consciousness materially embedded actors absorb, develop and promote in order to give meaning to their material reality and to define social interests.

With the above definitions in mind, it can be said that Marx’s usage of the terms ‘economics’ and ‘politics’ is quite distinct from popular definitions, which tend to equate economics with markets, finance, trade, capital, credit, land, etc., and politics with identity, representation, government, policy, law, and war. Indeed, in Marx’s materialist framework – oriented as it is to a level of abstraction where relations and power form key units of analysis – it is entirely possible for critical productive determinations to function through the latter forms. So, if we adopt Marx’s standpoint, the ‘economic structure’ of a particular society might well reference phenomena popularly labelled political.

The second dimension of Marx’s thought in need of clarification – which dovetails closely with the first point – involves his famous distinction between the base and superstructure. For Marx, the base denotes the economic structure of society in the very precise sense referred to above, while the superstructure captures those ideological forms in which humans become conscious of their material world. An important annotation to this distinction is added by Marx (1971: 21): ‘It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out’. That is, the productive relations that historically form between human beings – and their transformation – can be studied with a certain degree of scientific accuracy; on the other hand, the forms through which human beings become conscious of these relations are conjunctural in character, influenced as they are by regional variations in tradition and culture, in addition to the creative particularities of agency and struggle.

With both points of clarification in mind, if we accept Marx’s contention that the organization of state power mediates the reproduction of material life, it is reasonable to conclude that the state-form is a social space where productive determinations function; and that these determinations can be approximated scientifically, even if operationalized through quite distinct political arrangements, which vary from region to region. Of course, in his famously unfinished critique of political economy, Marx did not offer a theoretical basis on which to think about this aspect of the capitalist state – the first three volumes being devoted to the social mechanisms through which capital, as a class, extracts surplus value from the immediate producer, and the tendencies these processes cultivate. Nevertheless, there is strong evidence to suggest that Marx envisaged further volumes (Lebowitz, 2003), with one in particular dealing with the state – this he noted to Engels in 1858: ‘The whole business [Capital] is to be divided into six books: 1) Capital. 2) Landed Property. 3) Wage Labour. 4) State. 5) International Trade. 6) World Market’ (Marx and Engels, 1982: 97). ⁴

It is hard to imagine that Marx would have made this plan for a scientific treatise such as Capital if the state was an appendage of superstructure. That said, in Marx’s plan the state-form – and the productive determinations organized through it – was to be articulated after a range of more elementary processes had been examined (see Marx, 1973: 100–1). Marx’s analysis of these elementary processes allowed him to conceptualize capital’s tendency to intensively and extensively drive the expansion of the productive forces, creating gradually more integrated forms of social production that generate growing masses of wealth, which are then privately appropriated by increasingly concentrated and centralized units of capital. ⁵ An advanced social mode of production, mediated through private forms of organization and appropriation, that functions on a global scale, strongly implies the emergence of productive practices capable of managing this integrated and expansive system.

It is at this moment in the analysis that Foucault’s scholarship offers stimulating guidance. With a keen sense for historical difference, Foucault conceptualizes the emergence of social practices and rationalities – rooted in a new schema of power – geared towards managing increasingly integrated productive units, where rapid flows of people, and value, in its many different forms, are intersecting, transforming space-time and then, owing to a range of contradictions, thronging out of equilibrium, often catastrophically, before the purging effect of crisis allows a process of social renewal to occur; behind all of which stands the lawful tendencies associated with capital accumulation, within a historically distinct framework of social relations. Governmental practices capable of steering rapidly accelerating social metabolism, and influencing how wealth flows, and is concretely arranged, on different spatio-temporal salces, are intrinsic to this volatile process of accumulation and circulation. Indeed, in a bid to achieve certain desired finalities, technologies of government can influence the quantity and quality of social labour available to indiviudal units of capital, the intensity and conditions under which labour is used, the velocity and trajectory of flows in investment and credit, the dynamism of different markets, the capacity of society to consume, the shape and character of the built environment, etc., in short government conditions the fundamental beat of capitalism’s arterial flows. The organization and application of governmental power is, therefore, no mere adjunct to the capitalist mode of production, it is a vital part of the social infrastructure through which surplus value is extracted from the immediate producer.

It is important to remember at this stage that Marx conceptualizes class as a social force which functions as a whole, as opposed to a cumulative unit made up of individual exploiters. Accordingly, although the bourgeoisie may consist of competing units, productive relations bind capital’s working parts together, so they function as a totality, albeit behind the individual’s back. Out of this totality emerge class fractions that ostensibly operate separately from each other, yet are connected by a deeper set of social determinations which allow capitalism to be reproduced out of a seemingly chaotic clash of individual interests. So, from a state theory perspective, the challenge then becomes one of understanding the nature of capital’s governing moment and the semi-autonomous institutional framework it inspires, which must be intermixed with an appreciation of the social mediations that organically tie states into a broader complex of productive relations. Foucault’s work offers a series of stimulating clues in this respect. That said, if these insights are to be included within a Marxist cannon it is vital that we push beyond Capital, Volumes 1–3, in order to consider how governmentality might be incorporated into existing understandings of capitalist productive relations so as to enrich and expand the Marxist theory of the capitalist mode of production. The practical benefits such a theoretical programme may accrue will be pointed to in the final section of this paper using the example of Papua New Guinea, a country where the author has spent a decade researching state crime.

Rereading the Patrimonial State in Papua New Guinea

The Papua New Guinea (PNG) state is often distinguished in the regional literature by highlighting its patrimonial dimensions which, it is argued, deviate from the Westminster tradition of government that the country was originally modelled on during the colonial era (Allen and Hasnain, 2010: 9; Connell, 1997: 31). Explanation for this deviation is found in the cultural relations of reciprocity that form between big-men – the Melanesian mode of chieftaincy – and their support base (Dinnen, 2001: 190–1; Ghai, 1997: 326; May, 2004: 45; Rynkiewich, 2000: 18; Standish, 2007: 140). The emergence of big-man style politics at the national level, so the argument goes, has fractured the party system, creating in its wake loosely knit support groups populated by individual Members of Parliament (MPs) in pursuit of ministerial posts – posts they can then use to reward their support base, advance personal business interests, and develop a war-chest for future elections (Allen and Hasnain, 2010; 12; Strathern, 1993: 42). This patrimonial modality of politics, it is claimed, has significantly curtailed the national government’s capacity to make policy, which in turn manifests in unimpressive human development indicators (see Connell, 1997: 276; Ghai, 1997: 317; Regan, 1997: 88–90; Rynkiewich, 2000: 27–35; Turner, 1990: 111). Given that PNG’s political deviancy emerges from an especially fragmented form of politics indigenous to a country marked by extreme ethnic diversity – it is estimated that PNG has over 800 different language groups – interventions aimed at addressing ‘state weakness’ have tended to focus on reforms that stabilize the party system, and which broaden the support base MPs’ need to obtain office (Ghai, 1997: 315; Regan, 1997: 88–9l; Turner, 1990: 115).

There is something instantly satisfying about the above analysis – it appears to identify the source of PNG’s corrosive political metabolism which has weakened the state considerably since independence (PNG obtained independence in 1975). However, beneath the froth of patrimonial politics lies a complex productive reality – rooted in PNG’s peculiar path of development – whose dynamics offer a richer explanatory basis for this observed reality. Of course, in the limited space remaining a conclusive account of this reality is not possible; nevertheless, certain key points can be signposted. We will begin by briefly examining the transitional period which accompanied colonization.

The key challenge which faced the Australian colonial regime during this period was negotiating PNG’s particular path of immersion within a maturing capitalist world system (of course, indigenous forces also played a critical role in this process). To that end, the rural strategy pursued by the Australian administration focused on increasing the quality and quantity of labour available to rural households, and then channelling this labour time into production for exchange, through the tactical extension of health, education and technical advisory services (Donaldson and Good, 1988: 76–9; McCasker, 1966: 5–8). Colonial field officers overseeing these efforts were also responsible for changing the way households related to land and labour-time, in communities largely defined by production for use and social obligations centring upon clan unity (Connell, 1978: 87–8; Hawksley, 2007: 198). What we witness then during the colonial period is an emerging set of practices – organized around a logic of governmentality, and functioning through certain colonial institutions – that take the rural population as their object, and whose aim is to stimulate smallholder production for exchange by freeing land and labour from a subsistence economy rooted in clan traditions (Connell, 1978: 81; Connell, 1997: 20).

In addition to this, the colonial administration also devoted considerable effort to mapping PNG’s natural resource wealth. These efforts were married to a range of socio-legal technologies engineered to attract investment. It was hoped that a major extractive project, developed by international capital, would lower PNG’s dependence on Australian stipends (Barnes, 1969: 333–4; Denoon, 1985: 126–7). By independence, this strategy had prompted a significant investment by Rio Tinto in the North Solomons Province, which by 1988–9 accounted for 24 per cent of total government revenue (Namaliu, 1995: 61); large-scale mines at Ok Tedi, Lihir, and Porgera, added to the PNG state’s income during the 1990s, as did oil and gas operations at Hides and Kutubu. More recently, Exxon has invested US$19 billion in a bid to extract PNG’s significant natural gas reserves – a move which is having a seismic effect upon the national economy and government revenues (Guoy et al., 2010: 8). As we will shortly see, this exponential growth in PNG’s extractive industries over the past two decades has been facilitated through a range of interventions engineered by the national government. Indeed, while the natural resource sector may have been sparked during the colonial era, it has expanded following independence with considerable aid from the PNG state (Standish, 2007: 139). On the other hand, initial colonial efforts directed towards stimulating rural production have largely fallen into neglect (see Allen, 2009; Cammack, 2009).

Rather than being a product of mere omission, however, this above historical shift reflects a willed process of change in the organization of governmental power spearheaded by an increasingly muscular national bourgeoisie – with significant interests in the urban service sector, ranging from real estate to legal services – who have seized critical footholds within the PNG state. In particular, their rise has prompted important developments that help explain the above tendencies – i.e. resource sector growth and rural service decline – in addition to some of the more corrosive aspects of national politics.

First, a series of governing technologies have been engineered in order to stimulate and regulate the inflow of capital, particularly within the resource sector. Tax holidays, tariff reductions, deregulation, currency flotation, wage ‘restraints’, privatization, and the relaxation of visa laws have all been employed to stimulate foreign investment (Faal, 2006: 15). In addition to this, resource operators’ security of tenure has been supported through a range of socio-legal techniques that encourage clan groups to participate in the extractive industries, albeit on a peripheral basis (primarily through rents, involvement in spin-off businesses, employment and, on occasions, equity interests) (Banks, 2001: 79–80). ⁶ Stimulating local participation, in this respect, has been a crucial tool for co-opting community power brokers into long-term mine governance structures and dulling village resistance (see Lasslett, 2010). Where resistance to the commodification process is experienced, retributive violence is often meted out by the Royal PNG Constabulary’s paramilitary wing, the mobile squads (see Connell, 1997; Dinnen, 2001; Lasslett, 2010). Over the past two decades, the collective application of these governmental technologies has freed the country’s natural resources from the control of its tribal custodians, allowing their absorption into the valorizing cycles of capital. The subsequent intensification of government revenues has, in turn, shaped the accumulation strategies of PNG’s emerging national bourgeoisie. However, once again the organization of governmental power has played a critical role.

Here it is important to remember that governmental power is not external to the processes and milieus through which capital accumulation takes place; rather, it is ever-present in their functioning. Indeed, how state power is, or is not, applied impacts significantly on the arterial rhythms of the population – its economic structures, health, movement, built environment, living circumstances, etc – and, therefore, on the regime of capital accumulation that emerges within a specific national context. With that in mind it may be observed that over the past two decades the organization of governmental power in PNG has produced important effects through certain acts of omission – that is, by the way in which it is limited or refrained. In particular, we have witnessed the tactical retraction of governmental power from development planning, and the oversight of spending (leaving PNG’s auditing apparatus a form without content) (see Jones, 2012; Payani, 2003). ⁷ But far from being an example of state-weakness, this is the willed outcome of a conscious strategy to expose state finances and resources to a range of predatory practices, largely organized – albeit in a fragmented and atomized fashion – by parasitic fractions of the national bourgeoisie who have successfully infiltrated key power networks within the state (with a supporting cast of international actors). ⁸

For example, over the past decade we have witnessed PNG’s urbanization strategy go by the wayside, as have controls over the circulation of state land; as a result, prime blocs of state property are being illicitly acquired by politicians and connected business figures at well below market value – with Land Board complicity. They are then sold on at significant profit without meeting physical planning, tendering or Land Act requirements (see Auditor General’s Office, 2007; Lasslett, 2012; Public Accounts Committee, 2006). ⁹ Other examples of the relationship between government omission and predation also exist. For instance, one of the state’s most important instruments for operationalizing government power, public spending, has been stripped of fiscal oversight in PNG. Accordingly, work and service contracts are increasingly beholden to cronyism and bribery. Audit investigations into these contracts – which are often valued in the millions of kina – have revealed flagrant breaches of tendering processes, conflicts of interest, illegal payments and manifest failures to complete contracted tasks (Auditor General’s Office, 2001; Auditor General’s Office, 2005; Public Accounts Committee, 2003).

Collectively, these rather extreme efforts to ‘not govern’ have created an environment where parasitic forms of capital accumulation – a sphere in which the national urban bourgeoisie have an edge, immersed as they are within its distinctive organizing framework – can readily predate on rising state revenues which have been increased, in part, by the growing circulation of PNG’s natural resources. ¹⁰ What we have here then is a particular form of symbiosis; on the one hand governmental power is strategically applied in order to free PNG’s natural resources, stimulate foreign investment, and increase the flow of state-revenues and, on the other hand, this same power is strategically weakened when it comes to the state’s planning and governance apparatus. This pincer movement creates the conditions in which state revenues can bulwark the accumulating strategies of muscular sections within the national bourgeoisie, much to the chagrin of an increasingly disenfranchised urban and rural work force, in addition to a relatively weak petit-bourgeoisie and a manufacturing capitalist class.

In this context, efforts to reform electoral politics will not significantly impact on PNG’s national political culture; to the contrary, contemporary interventions directed towards stabilizing political rule may actually serve to consolidate the influence of the parasitic class fractions who have commandeered prime positions within the state and insulate them from further critical scrutiny. Consequently, any serious movement of resistance in PNG – whether it be revolutionary or reformative – must direct its attention towards challenging the corrosive nexus between the extractive industries and the national bourgeoisie. Here the value of Foucault’s conceptual framework is evident. By viewing the state as a fluid episode in the organization of governmental power, it helps focus attention on how this modality of power is historically organized in particular configurations, and the part played by these configurations in effecting the social processes through which capital accumulates.

In the case of PNG the organization and application of governmental power has bulwarked the rising fortunes of international mining conglomerates, in addition to more localized bands of national businessmen who cycle between the state and service sector. Both have, in effect, become partners – though not necessarily in any conspiratorial sense – in a national accumulation regime. The Gordian knot tying them together stems from the particular way in which governmental power has been organized and operationalized in PNG. Accordingly, the latter must be consciously targeted by any social movement serious about provoking emancipatory change. Indeed, as Foucault himself observes: ‘If one fails to recognise … points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process’ (Chomsky and Foucault, 2006: 41).

Conclusion

‘Marx’s central theoretical text [Capital]’, writes Rogers (2004: 3), ‘even if we accept it on his own terms, offers no more than a first approximation of an analytical framework appropriate to the interpretation of modern history’. Of course, that said, we should not understate the importance of Capital – both as a conceptual treatise on the capitalist mode of production, and as an exemplar of the dialectical method, it is without comparison. Nevertheless, the sinuous core of the capitalist mode of production contains features that were only hinted at by Marx. Demanding theoretical work remains if we are to tease out more fully that resonant material structure constitutive of capitalism, which has outlived prophecies of its imminent collapse. Indeed, Lebowitz (2003: 25) remarks in the former respect, ‘Capital’s silence … is at the root of the deficiencies of Actually Existing Marxism’. Marxist state theory specifically demonstrates this general point.

Accordingly, it has been argued that we must theorize the state system’s productive content in line with the plan originally envisioned by Marx. Foucault’s late work on governmentality provides an important starting point for such a theoretical endeavour. In particular, his intervention helps illuminate how the organization of power – in its historically distinct modern form – remains critical to the functionality of the capitalist mode of production. Accordingly, by appropriating and extending Foucault’s framework in a way that complements and expands the conceptual programme developed in Capital, Marxism can begin to move beyond the abstraction of the political state, replacing it with more concrete approximations that place the state system where it belongs, at the very heart of the capitalist system.