请将“The work of Herzog initiated this process in French stamocap theory but it has remained an isolated and undeveloped theoretical contribution. The recent work German work of Jung on variant forms of state monopoly capitalism is also interesting and might well suggest several parallels with the growth of Thatcherism as a private variant in Britain. But both theorists still adopt a residually economistic and class reductionist analysis of political forces and still subscribe to a treatment of state power as the essential expression of state monopoly capitalism. Thus it remains to be seen how the problems of an adequate political and ideological analysis can be resolved by building upon the work of the most sophisticated stamocap theorists.

METHODOLOGICAL CRITIQUE

So far I have glossed over the exact methodological status of stamocap theory. However, as should be evident from my remarks on the specific claims of ‘stamocap’ theory about the nature of modem capitalism and/or the modem state, substantive criticisms are necessarily related to particular methodological assumptions. In this context it is clear that the principal (but by no means the sole) methodological approach is more indebted to the work of Lenin on imperialism than of Marx on capitalism. For ‘stamocap’ arguments more often proceed through empirical generalisations and/or the subsumption of particular cases under general concepts or explanatory principles than they do through a movement from abstract to concrete by way of the logical derivation and/or contingent, differential articulation of concepts, assumptions, and principles of explanation to reproduce the concrete as the complex synthesis of multiple determinations (compare the empiricist conception of historical materialism in Lenin, 1894, pp. 136-142ff, the empiricist conception of dialectical materialism in Lenin, 1908, passim, and the empiricist method of presentation in his principal work on imperialism, Lenin, 1917b, with the realist account of the method of political economy in Marx, 1857, pp. 100-108, and the realist movement from abstract to concrete as the method of presentation in Das Kapital. I do not deny that ‘stamocap’ theories distinguish between abstract and concrete as well as between general and particular; or, again, that they argue for the inclusion of many causal factors and recognise the existence of counter-tendencies as well as tendencies in the dialectic of social development. It is to argue that the basic approach adopted in much ‘stamocap’ work renders such distinctions and arguments nugatory and creates significant theoretical and political problems.

This approach involves the repetition of basic Marxist-Leninist principles and the subsumption of specific cases under these principles. These include a variety of laws, tendencies, essences, and interpretive criteria pitched at various levels of generality or abstraction, such as the laws of value, surplus-value, maximum possible profit, and uneven development, the historical trends towards the socialisation of labour, the concentration and centralisation of production, the relative impoverishment of the working class, and the general crisis of capitalism, essential features of historical stages such as the five essential features of imperialism (see above, pp. 33-34) or the fusion of the state and monopolies into a single mechanism in the stamocap system, and interpretive criteria such as the basic determining role of production relations in social life, the role of class struggle as the motor force of history, or the class and partisan nature of the science of political economy. Now, even where such principles occur originally in the work of Marx or Engels, they no longer function theoretically as abstract principles whose effects are subject to complex mediations and the intervention of counter-tendencies. Instead they are transformed into essentialised principles with immediate consequences for social life and/or into generalisations which subsume particular instances. In most cases, however, these principles have been developed during the so-called ‘era of imperialism and proletarian revolution’. They are either based on more or less careful empirical, albeit inevitably theory-laden, observation (i.e., pseudo-induction) and/or on more or less arbitrary theoretical arguments phrased in terms of MarxismLeninism (i.e., pseudo-deduction). Regardless of their specific provenance, they are deployed in the same manner as the transformed Marxian principles. Thus, in place of a careful specification of the real causal mechanisms that are located beneath the empirically observable level of surface appearances and that generate causal tendencies whose effects are mediated in complex ways and/or are subject to the intervention of counter-tendencies before being actualised, they either operate wholly on the empirical level through a reciprocal movement between the general and particular and/or penetrate beneath the surface merely to postulate essential laws or tendencies that are immediately realised on the surface and/or are subject only to inessential modifications. These methods of theory- construction and presentation are combined with a commitment to the class and partisan nature of political economy so that the development of ‘stamocap’ theory is subordinated to political considerations and efforts are made to draw immediate political conclusions from theoretical enquiries.

This widely prevailing methodology has several serious implications for the theoretical status of stamocap analyses. Thus, in so far as they proceed through empirical generalisations and/or essentialised laws and tendencies, they are trapped in the well-known ‘double bind’ or trade-off between generality and determinacy. For general statements involving a high level of determinacy (or information content) run the danger of empirical falsity in a large number of particular cases; whereas general statements with low determinacy (or informational content) tend to be meaningless. This holds true whether the general statement is lawlike (striving for the maximum profit, uneven development), an historically discernible trend (relative impoverishment of the working class, absolute ruin of the peasantry and artisanate), an essentialised concept (such as imperialism or state monopoly capitalism), or an interpretive criterion (economic determinism, class struggle). This is reflected in the frequent resort of Marxist-Leninist stamocap theory to the techniques of subsumption, i.e., the development of general principles to fix the common features or essential properties of phenomena and the subsequent treatment of particular cases as so many instantiations or illustrations of these general principles. Thus all forms of state are reduced to reactionary dictatorships of the financial oligarchy and characterised by the fusion of the state and monopolies into a single mechanism. Not only does this entail systematic neglect of the specificity of different cases with potentially disastrous political consequences (witness the policies of the Comintern towards ‘social fascism’ during the rise of Nazism), it also means that deviations from these common features or essential properties must be explained away. Thus, whereas conformity with the general principles is taken for granted and considered as non-problematic, deviations are dismissed as accidental, inconsequential, temporary, inessential, and so on. Alternatively they are resolved dialectically through subsumption under another general principle whose effects modify or counteract the initial principle. Thus, if it seems that the ‘stamocap’ state is not fused into a single mechanism with the monopoly bourgeoisie and that its policies do not unambiguously reflect the interests of monopoly capital, this is attributed to the tendential intensification of all the contradictions in capitalism and the growing mobilisation of class forces around the proletarian pole of the capital-labour antagonism. This makes it difficult to derive any unequivocal conclusions from Marxist-Leninist principles and reinforces the overall impression of indeterminacy or vacuity in much stamocap work situated in the ‘monopoly- theoretical’ tradition and, to a lesser extent, in the ‘capital-theoretical’ tradition.

It is this basic methodological approach that explains the emphasis on distinctions at the level of market relations rather than of ‘capital in general’ (e.g., monopoly as the negation of competition, monopoly capital vs. non-monopoly capital), the descriptive bias of key concepts (imperialism, general crisis, state monopoly capitalism), the conflation of conjunctural and structural elements in key concepts (the inclusion of the coalescence of bank and industrial capital in imperialism found in Germany rather than the general structural phenomenon of increasing mobility of money capital and private credit through the rise of markets in financial assets), an inability to offer firm criteria for historical periodisation (witness the disagreements concerning the existence of a new phase of the third stage or the emergence of a fourth stage in the general crisis and the continuing disputes as to whether stamocap is a distinct stage in imperialism or merely a tendency coeval with it), the resort to originating subjects on the surface of society in preference to the dissolution of originating subjects into their constitutive and overdetermining causal influences (the treatment of monopolies as free-willed subjects striving for the maximum possible profit or the tendency to treat the state as the instrument of a unitary monopoly bourgeoisie and/or as a unitary subject in its own right), the neglect of economic, political, and ideological forms in preferences to class reductionist accounts of their content (downgrading the value form in economic analysis in favour of ‘monopoly- theoretical’ explanations or ignoring the question of state form in favour of its essentialisation as class dictatorship), the failure to consider the mediations that bring about the realisation of laws and tendencies in apparently pure form as well as the mediations that result in their non-realisation or distortion due to the intervention of countervailing tendencies or analogous factors (as in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), and so forth.

This approach is less evident in the growing body of state monopoly capitalism work in the ‘capital-theoretical’ tradition. A clear example of this methodological shift occurs in the work of Fine and Harris but the same method of abstraction is also found in the studies of other theorists who start out from the nature of capitalist commodity production, such as Jung and Schleifstein, Katzenstein, Wygodski, and Zieschang. This is not to suggest that the ‘capital logic’ critique of stamocap theories is wholly correct in arguing for the strict logical derivation of the categories for an analysis of monopoly and/or state monopoly capitalism from the categories of Das Kapital. It is to insist that the categories for such analyses must be introduced at the appropriate moments in the movement from abstract to concrete and their articulation (whether this be logically necessary or historically contingent) established within the hierarchy of determinations and conditions of existence.
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