请翻译成通顺、自然、准确的汉语，Fine and Harris attempt to transcend the Neo-Ricardian — Fundamentalist debate and to take rhe analysis of the state a step further in their discussion of Gough (1976a) and their review of recent debates (1976b). Correctly they criticize Gough for not starting from the category of capital; correctly too they nevertheless emphasize the specificity of the political and the importance of developing a materialist theory of the state. They do not progress very far, however, in analysing the relation between capital and the state, basically because they appear to see capital simply as an economic category and adopt a simple base-superstructure model of society in which the economic base is determinant. Capital and the economic are thus posited a priori as being separate from the political, so that it is not clear how the unity (and interrelation) of the separate spheres is to be analysed. We shall argue that this starting point is incapable of yielding a solution: what is required is not an economic but a materialist theory of the state. The economic should not be seen as the base which determines the political superstructure, but rather the economic and the political are both forms of social relations, forms assumed by the basic relation of class conflict in capitalist society, the capital relation; forms whose separate existence springs, both logically and historically, from the nature of that relation. The development of the political sphere is not to be seen as a reflection of the economic, but is to be understood in terms of the development of the capital relation, i.e. of class exploitation in capitalist production. It was on the basis of capitalist production in general that Marx developed his critique of economic forms; and it is also on the analysis of the development of relations of production as class relations that the critique of bourgeois political forms must be based.
Implicit in our account of the analyses of the state currently influential in British Marxist discussion has been a contrast between these analyses and the German debate which we present in this book and which we shall now go on to examine in greater detail. It may be helpful to reiterate our main points in order to underline the advances which we feel the German discussion has made in the analysis of the state. We have argued that the inadequacy of the theories current in Britain stems from a failure to focus on the relation between state and society, or, put more generally, a failure to analyse the articulation of the totality of capitalist social relations. On the one hand, we have seen the acceptance of the fetishized categories of bourgeois thought, the acceptance as a positive given of the fragmentation of bourgeois society into the economic and the political: this, we have argued, leads inevitably to an a-historical and therefore utopian analysis of capitalism and the possibilities of socialism. Here the separation of the economic and political spheres is emphasized, the unifying totality neglected. At the other extreme we have seen the reduction of politics to a mere reflection of the economic, an overemphasis on the unifying whole which overlooks the real, though historically conditioned particularization of the generality of capitalist relations into political and economic forms: the result is an over-simplified view of the relation between the actions of the state and the requirements of capital accumulation.
The starting point of the whole German ‘state derivation’ debate is the critique of those theorists (Offe and Habermas) who divorce the study of politics from the analysis of capital accumulation. Instead of simply reiterating the connection between capital and the state, however, the contributions to the debate have accepted the separation of the economic and the political and have tried to establish, logically and historically, the foundation of that separation in the nature of capitalist production. In other words, the aim has been to derive the state (or the separation of economics and politics) from the category of capital. This was the essential departure made by the seminal essay of Wolfgang Muller and Christel Neusiiss. In the course of the debate much criticism has been heaped upon this article, but the basic starting point, the emphasis on the need to found the separation of the political from the economic in the analysis of capital, has been universally accepted, has indeed come to be taken for granted as a commonplace. In our view, this simple step, which emphasizes simultaneously the unifying totality' of capitalistsocial relations and the historically conditioned fragmentation of those rela-tionsjnto fetishized forms, is an important step in creating the framework for a materialist analysis of the state. In the rest of this introduction it will be necessary to analyse the German debate to see what progress has been made in developing such a theory, and how the progress made might be developed further.
The State Derivation debate
Since the ‘state derivation’ debate often appears to be so abstract, it is good to emphasize from the beginning that it is a response to practical political problems. Events in the Federal Republic of Germany in the late 1960s presented political problems for which previous Marxist analyses provided no ready answers. There were three developments which pointed forcefully towards much the same question. First, the recession of 1966—67, the first major break in the West German ‘economic miracle’, had brought the Social Democrats (SPD) into office for the first time since the War, as minority partners in the Grand Coalition with the Christian Democrats} the governmental change was accompanied by the completion of an ideological shift from the post-war liberalism to an emphasis on state intervention and planning, and it was this change in policy which was accredited with the successful economic recovery in 1967 and 1968. Secondly, the elections of 1969 brought the SPD into office as the major partner in a socio-liberal government pledged to bring in sweeping social reforms. Thirdly, the intervening period had seen the rise and decline of a powerful student movement which, although theoretically more developed than the French or British movement, had yet never succeeded in establishing real contact with the working-class movement. All these three developments raised in slightly different form the same question — the question of the limits (and possibilities) of state action. The first development raised the question of whether the state could go on ‘managing’ crises and planning social development indefinitely, whether the state could continue without apparent limit to mould society in the interests of capital (as was implicit in the writings of Marcuse and others influential in the late 1960s). The second development, the coming to power of the socio-liberal coalition, posed the problem of the ability of reformist governments to achieve meaningful reforms, i.e. the problem of the limits of reformism. Thirdly, the failure of the student movement to establish links with the workers posed the problem of understanding the material basis of the widespread faith in reformism. These are the main problems with which this German debate on the state is trying to grapple. Certainly there are other problems which play a role: as the crisis grows deeper in the mid-seventies and the state’s policy becomes more repressive, the problems of the functionality of state action and the repressive nature of the state come more to the fore, but most of the debate which we reproduce here is concerned with the limits to state action and the basis of illusions in the power of the state.
For this task the existing Marxist theory of the state was found inadequate. The literature which had been politically important in the late 1960s (most notably Agnoli and Bruckner’s Transformation der Demokratie) had focused on the critique of bourgeois democracy. After underlining the political importance of this critique, Muller and Neusiiss, in the article which started the whole debate in 1970, point out that it is not adequate to solve the problems with which they are faced:
This critique, if it is taken seriously, must become a critique of the development of the various functions of the modern state . .. and of its concrete limits and contradictions. For by explaining and criticizing state institutions as the instruments of manipulation of the ruling class, it is not possible to discover the limits of that manipulation. These can only be revealed by an analysis which shows in detail the needs for and the limits to state intervention, arising from the contradictions of the capitalist process of production as a labour-process and a valorization process.
(Below, p. 33.)