请将“The mobilization of counter-tcndcncies means in practice the reorganization of an historical complex of general social conditions of production and relations of exploitation in a process which can proceed only in a crisis-ridden manner. Thus the real course of the necessarily crisis-ridden process of accumulation and development of capitalist society decisively depends on whether and in what manner the necessary reorganization of the conditions of production and relations of exploitation succeeds.
(Below, p. 74.)
For a rigorously theorized historical analysis of capitalist economic and political development, it is therefore necessary to focus on this process of constant reorganization by struggle and through crisis of capitalist social relations, economic and political.
This approach, which takes as its starting point the antagonistic relation between capital and labour in the process of accumulation, thus provides us with a framework for an historical and materialist analysis of the state. The process of constantly renewed reorganization of social relations inherent in the concept of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is an historical process which does not start completely afresh each time, but in which each cycle of reorganization is moulded by the ever-intensifying contradictions springing from the previous reorganization. Although the reorganization takes on different shapes in specific conjunctures, the fundamental forms have everywhere been shaped by the contradictions of the process of accumulation. It is thus possible to distinguish different phases of (economic and political) reorganization which take place on a global basis. In this approach, the actual history of the development of state functions and state institutions is therefore not something which has somehow to be added after the logical derivation has been completed, it is already implicit in the ‘logical’ analysis. In other words, the analysis is not only logical but also historical.20 As Hirch puts it:
the investigation of state functions must be based on the conceptual analysis of the historical course of the process of capitalist accumulation; it must be borne in mind, however, that this is not a question of the logical deduction of abstract laws but of the conceptually informed understanding of an historical process .. .. (Below, p. 82.)
This point seems to us of central importance. The purpose of the Marxist critique of political and economic forms is not simply to analyse a given society. It makes little sense to talk of the capitalist ‘forms’ of social relations at all unless one has other forms in mind, unless one regards these forms as transitory. Implicit in the very concept of ‘form’ is the idea that it is historically determined and historically developing. It is precisely this critique of capitalist forms as transitory forms which provides the basis of Marxist analysis. As Rosa Luxemburg put it:
The secret of Marx’s theory of value, of his analysis of the problem of money, of his theory of capital, of the theory of the rate of profit and consequently of the entire economic system, is found in the transitory character of capitalist economy .... It is only because Marx looked at capitalism from the socialist’s viewpoint, that is, from the historical viewpoint, that he was enabled to decipher the hieroglyphics of capitalist economy. (1899, p. 58.)
Consequently, the categories developed by Marx to criticize the forms of capitalist society were designed not to describe a static society but to conceptualize these forms as expressions of an historical process:
Marx’s logical mode of conceptualizing the economy, as Engels says, is ultimately a historical one, stripped of its historical form and disturbing accidents. It provides therefore — albeit abstractly — a mirror image of the real historical process, ‘a corrected mirror image, but corrected according to principles which permit us to grasp the real historical processes so that every moment can be viewed at the developmental point of its full maturity, at the moment of its classical perfection’. (Rosdolsky 1974, p. 65.)
It is therefore surely wrong to draw a clear distinction between form analysis and historical analysis, as do Blanke, Jurgens and Kastendiek. Form analysis is analysis of an historically determined and historically developing form of social relations, and it is hard to see how an adequate form analysis can be anything other than historical.
The problem, however, is not simply to see Marx’s categories as simultaneously logical and historical categories, for the difficulty still remains of relating the ‘corrected mirror image’ to ‘the real historical process’, of relating capitalist accumulation and its formally derived tendencies to the actual development of class struggle, of understanding class struggle not just in its form but in its interaction of form and content. In this respect it is possible to raise doubts about Hirsch’s development of his own analysis. The focal point of Hirsch’s article seems to us to lie in his analysis of the mobilization of the counter-tendencies to the falling rate of profit as a necessary (form-determined) economic, political and ideological process of class struggle to restructure the social relations of capitalist production. This struggle (the struggle to maintain or restore the conditions for accumulation) is subject to certain formal constraints and goals which can be derived logically from the nature of surplus value production. The outcome of the struggle, however, cannot be derived from its form, but can only be analysed in terms of the concrete contents of the struggle, the organization and strength of the various classes and class fractions, the manner in which the struggle is waged on the economic, political and ideological fronts, etc. This struggle, the struggle to accumulate, in which capital is confronted continually by its own immanent barriers and seeks to overcome these barriers while remaining within the framework of its own (restructured) existence, is surely the core of class struggle in capitalist society. This point, central to his analysis of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, tends perhaps to slip away from Hirsch in the subsequent development of his argument. The second part of his article is concerned with giving an historical outline of the principal phases of the reorganization of capitalist social relations and its relation to the development of state functions. While this outline provides an invaluable framework within which to analyse the concrete process of the reorganization of the ‘historical complex of general social conditions of production and relations of exploitation’, the emphasis on this reorganization as a process of class struggle tends to become submerged. Operating on this level of abstraction, there is a tendency to suggest that the development of the state corresponds grosso tnodo to the requirements of capital accumulation, but that the analysis of the manner in which and extent to which these requirements express themselves and are (or are not) satisfied would require a theory of class struggle. There is perhaps a subtle shift from arguing that accumulation must be seen as a form-determined and crisis-ridden process of class struggle (and hence that class struggle must be seen as being focused on and formed by the struggle to accumulate) to suggesting that the relation between accumulation and state activity must be seen as being mediated through class struggle. Subtle though the shift may be, the consequences may be marked: whereas the former emphasis would lead on to an analysis of the separation and inter-relation of the economic and the political in the concrete processes of struggle to restructure capital, the latter emphasis is liable to suggest the need for the analysis of the (political) ‘missing link’ between the (economic) process of accumulation and the activity of the state. It seems to us more fruitful to pursue the first course, the analysis of accumulation as class struggle.21
In this perspective, Heide Gerstenberger’s insistence in her contribution on the importance of concrete historical research in any analysis of the development of the state is opportune. This emphasis on the historical analysis of the concrete course of class struggles in particular societies reveals of course the specificity of the development of particular states and brings to the fore the problem of the extent to which one can talk of the capitalist state. At the same time, however, the universalizing and socializing effects of the capitalist mode of production means that a general theory of the capitalist state is both possible and necessary. The global domination of the capitalist mode of production means that, in contrast to previous modes of production, there are not just a multiplicity of particular states whose forms reflect and result from the particular history of each society. The generalization of capitalist production relations produces a generalization of the conditions of reproduction of those relations. Furthermore, as Gerstenberger remarks, the increasing domination and extension of the capitalist mode of production produces a convergence in the structure and shape of individual states. However, a general theory of the capitalist state must base itself on the particular forms taken by the accumulation of capital and the actual history of the struggles through which the capitalist mode of production developed and spread on a global scale. Thus, Claudia von Braunmiihl stresses in her contribution the importance of relating the economic and the political not just in the context of the nation state but on an international scale. Viewed from this perspective, the very fragmentation of capital into national capitals and of the political organiza- 1 tion of international capital into nation states (as well as their relations within the imperalist system) must be established from the actual historical growth of capitalist production and the specific historical conditions which established national capitals and their relations in the world market. As she argues, not only the existence, but also the particular shape and historical development of particular nation states can be understood adequately only through an analysis of the relation between the state, the national capital and the international development of the contradictions of capitalist accumulation.”翻译为中文