请将“The analysis of the state was rediscovered as a major theoretical problem in the Federal Republic of Germany and in West Berlin in the 1960s and 1970s and, indeed, came to dominate discussion among German Marxists in this period. This distinctive preoccupation is attributable to the specific historical situation in West Germany. On the economic plane there had been a major expansion in the state apparatus and its activities in response to the economic crises of 1966-67 and 1974-75 and, at least in relation to the former, state intervention appeared to have resolved the crisis more or less successfully. On the political plane the 1966-67 crisis prepared the path for a social democratic government whose strong ties with the trade unions ensured working-class support for its crisis-management policies and reformist programme. The consolidation of such support for a bourgeois regime and the continued growth of the West German economy posed formidable theoretical and political problems for the various extra-parliamentary leftwing parties, groups, and tendencies. This was coupled with the development of a ‘strong state’ to reinforce the hegemony of social democracy with administrative, judicial, and police repression of ‘extremism’ and with the growth of West German hegemonial aspirations in the EEC and the wider world. On the ideological plane the extra-parliamentary left was faced with a celebration of the constitutional and democratic form of the Federal Republic and denigration of the Stalinist dictatorship in East Germany. This contrast helped to sustain the anticommunism of the working class and required a response beyond a dogmatic insistence on the essentially repressive nature of the bourgeois state. In short, while strong traditions of working-class industrial and political struggle in such countries as Italy and France have favoured a ‘class-theoretical’ analysis of the economy and state alike, West German Marxists were encouraged to consider them from a more determinist and ‘capital-theoretical’ perspective and to seek the supposed agent of revolutionary change outside the working class. However, as economic crises grew less manageable and combined with an emergent crisis of mass integration, the limits of the state derivation debate became increasingly evident and new initiatives were undertaken in the theoretical and political fields (on the historical background, see: Classen, 1979, pp. 1-6; Cobler, 1978, passim; Hirsch, 1980b, pp. 116-141; and Minnerup, 1976, pp. 7-44).

Originally the derivation debate was concerned with specifying the form and functions of the capitalist state and thereby showing the limits of political reformism. To all intents and purposes the debate began with a critique of ‘welfare state illusions’ in the post-war period in which Wolfgang Müller and Christel Neusüss put forward the main elements of the derivationist argument. They suggested that the basis of all ‘revisionism’ are the twin assumptions that, first, the state is independent of production and its economic laws and responds instead to sui generis relations of political force and, second, that the latter can be modified so that state power can be used to eliminate the cyclical and crisis-prone course of capitalist production, to redistribute income independently of its method of production, and to transform capitalism step by step (Müller and Neusüss, 1970, pp. 13-14, 18-19, 21, 26-27, 34). Revisionists in all periods had failed to see the essential connections between the state and production as distinct moments in the overall movement of capital and thus failed to perceive the limits on state action imposed by the laws of capital accumulation. In particular they had overlooked the dual character of the commodity as exchange-value and usevalue, the dual character of capitalist production as a means of valorisation of capital and as a technical labour process, the dual character of wages as variable capital and as revenue for the worker, etc., and the limitations these contradictory forms impose on the activities of the state in economic management and welfare provision. In opposition to such revisionism Müller and Neusüss claim that one can only comprehend the nature and limits of the state on the basis of the laws of surplus value production (1970, pp. 23-24n, 24-25, 57-49, 61).

Thus Müller and Neusüss emphasise that commodities must first be produced within the framework of the capital relation before they can be distributed through the market and/or political action and stress that the state must ensure this framework before it can begin its redistributive activities (1970, pp. 43ff). Indeed they argue that state intervention is not just a secondary activity aimed at modifying the effects of a self-sufficient market but is absolutely essential to sustain the operation of capitalist production and market relations. For, since individual capitals compete for profit, acting in their immediate self-interest and trying to avoid all limits to such action, some external force is required to impose the interests of capital in general. At the same time Müller and Neusüss argue that individual workers are unable to defend their collective interests in reproducing their labour-power for sale: thus the state mustalso encourage the organisation of the working class (albeit within the limits of reformism) to ensure continued commodity production (1970, pp. 69, 80-81). In this context they cite Marx’s discussion of factory legislation to show the essential role of the state in securing the long-term reproduction of capital through its protection of labourpower (1970, pp. 60-70). As the state is involved in capitalist reproduction on both sides of the capital-labour relation and responds in this to the changing fluctuations of the class struggle as mediated through the ‘public sphere’, it appears to be neutral and thereby sustains the ‘welfare state illusions’ prevalent among reformists (1970, pp. 70-72). However, although the state needs a certain measure of independence and room for manoeuvre in this context, there are definite limits to its autonomy imposed by the requirements of capital accumulation. Where the balance of forces in class struggle threatens to push the state beyond these limits, it will respond forcefully against the working class (1970, p. 72). Nonetheless Müller and Neusüss emphasise that the primary function of the capitalist state qua bourgeois political institution is not repression (a characteristic of all states) but its intervention to resolve ‘social problems’ on behalf of capital in general (1970, p. 77). In turn they conclude that, should the capitalist state prove unable to counteract the tendencies towards social selfdestruction inherent in capitalist exploitation and competition, the ‘welfare state illusion’ would fade and the labour movement would be able to advance towards socialism. Just this prospect is seen in the growing inability of the state to regulate capitalist exploitation based on relative (as opposed to absolute) surplus-value and the correlative need for the working class to confront capital directly at the point of production (1970, pp. 85-90).

This seminal contribution contains all the main ingredients of the subsequent Staatsableitung debate. But it is also remarkable for the vehemence with which it attacks the revisionists, reformists, and Frankfurt School theorists whom Müller and Neusüss accuse of the ‘welfare state illusion’. This polemical spirit is much attenuated in the subsequent Staatsableitungdebatte and later studies are more formal and ‘academic’ in tone even though they address similar issues. In particular Müller and Neusüss investigate the specificity of the bourgeois state in terms of its form as the illusory community of society as a whole in contradistinction to the material anarchy of production and in terms of its function in checking the social problems engendered through capital accumulation. They also consider the mediations between the appearance of class neutrality of the bourgeois state and its essential class character as an ‘ideal collective capitalist’. Finally they discuss the inherent limitations on state intervention under capitalism and the prospects for the awakening of socialist consciousness within the working class. At the same time their work does not fully develop the potential of the derivation method. For, not only do their arguments depend as much on illustration (notably the case of factory legislation) as they do on formal derivation, they also put greater weight on questions of function than form. Thus Müller and Neusüss can offer only a truncated account of the mediations between the forms and movement of the economic and political spheres. This is reflected in their more or less exclusive concern with the social policies of the capitalist state and their failure to examine how its form affects the state’s ability to intervene on behalf of capital. It remains to be seen how well other studies can resolve these problems through a more self-conscious use of the derivation approach.

But we must first offer a preliminary outline of what this approach involves. For, despite the proliferation of studies claiming to derive the form and/or functions of the capitalist state, there is no clear account of the nature and methods of derivation. At one extreme it has been equated with ‘logical inference’ in a hypothetico-deductive explanatory schema and thereby rendered indistinguishable from the methods of the positivist tradition (e.g., Kuhlen, 1979, pp. 312-321); and, at the other extreme, one study limits ‘derivation’ to an initial deduction of the basic form of politics (the person) from the cell form of economics (the commodity) and the subsequent elaboration of political determinations exactly homologous to those of the economic field2 (Oberlecher, 1975, pp. 1-13 and passim). This approach produced such path-breaking concepts as ‘constant’ and ‘variable’ persons, the ‘social composition of political domination’, and the law of ‘tendential decay in political effectiveness’ (ibid.).
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