Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin are, thankfully, far from followers of fashion. In a period when academics and public intellectuals extolled globalization as connoting the death of the nation state, they ensured a critical eye was trained, rather, on the neoliberal reorganization of the state. They acknowledge that although the nation state has been transformed since the end of the long boom, the idea that it has been usurped is wrong. Such positions, they contend, are based on the “mistaken notion that, in going global, capitalist markets were escaping, by-passing or diminishing the state.” While others envisioned multinationals as operating “free” of the impositions of state, Panitch and Gindin noted that capital “depend[s] on many states” in “maintaining property rights, overseeing contracts, stabilizing currencies, reproducing class relations and containing crisis.”

The Making of Global Capitalism begins with Panitch and Gindin outlining their conceptualization of the nature of the state. My contribution to this series is chiefly in response to this section and on how the authors conceive of the state in relation to class struggle. In referencing Marx’s only sketchy outlines of a theory of the state, they ground their analysis in the innovations of Nicos Poulantzas and Ralph Miliband. They argue that states, classes and markets have been mutually constituted by capitalism, but reject what they see as a tendency to analyze the state as derivative of abstract economic laws. Marx’s “conceptual categories,” they argue, were “developed to define the structural relationships and economic dynamics distinctive to capitalism” but can only be of significant value if they “guide an understanding of the choices made, and the specific institutions created, by specific historical actors.” “What states do in practice,” therefore, “and how well they do them, is the outcome of complex relations between societal and state actors, the balance of class forces, and, not least, the range and character of each state’s capacities.” States consequently develop distinct institutions and capabilities to facilitate successful accumulation, and to deal with actual and likely interruptions.

It is within this framework that they describe “the ‘relative autonomy’ of capitalist states: not as being unconnected to the capitalist classes, but rather as having autonomous capacities to act on behalf of the system as a whole.” They argue the state is a both a capitalist state (serving the interests of the ruling class) at the same time as functioning with relative autonomy from the immediate social relations of accumulation (meaning it is not the mechanical expression of patterns of accumulation). That is, what “states can autonomously do, or do in response to societal pressures, is ultimately limited by their dependence on the success of capital accumulation. It is above all in this sense that their autonomy is only relative.” Such an approach has been a long-term theme in Panitch’s work, and elsewhere he cites Poulantzas’ well-known formulation that the capitalist state, in the long run, can only correspond to the interests of the dominant class or classes.