Ilias Alami and Adam D. Dixon, The Spectre of State Capitalism, Oxford University Press, 2004. Hbk £90. PDF Free to download.
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RATING: 60
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Buy this book?
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No need
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Two years ago Toby Carroll and Darryl Jarvis published a damning critique of recent work by Alami, Dixon, and (in one case) Emma Mawdsley, describing it as ‘inaccurate, inchoate and unnecessarily complicated’, and cautioning against ‘readings of phenomena associated with the return of the state that are delinked from understanding the state in a socio-relational sense and tied to patterns of accumulation under late capitalism’ (2022: 1716). Alami, Dixon and Mawdsley published an online response (2022), but there is no reference to that exchange here, despite the fact that Alami and Dixon draw heavily on that same recent work. You should definitely read Carroll and Jarvis, if you haven’t already, maybe before proceeding further with this review. As their main point is crucial and well made – that an analytical framework that allows an understanding of ‘state capitalism’ must start with a broader understanding of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism – I can be fairly brief. I treat this new text on its own merits, summarizing the argument, then illustrating selectively some of its main failings.
Alami and Dixon have plenty to say on ‘patterns of accumulation under late capitalism’, but none of it affects their analytical framework, which brings together a number of different institutional forms (sovereign wealth funds, policy and development banks, state enterprises, and state-private partnerships), and political or policy orientations (techno-industrial policy, spatial development strategies, and economic nationalism), grouped under the headings of state-capital hybrids and muscular forms of statism respectively. They argue that these ‘co-constitute’ state capitalism (Figure 1.1, p. 14). In short, ‘a particular set of contradictions characteristic of our current capitalist epoch’ (2) have brought about ‘a historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention’ marked by ‘the drastic reconfiguration and expansion of the role of the state as promotor, supervisor, and owner of capital’ (7). The transformations involved are potentially epoch-defining, structured by ‘deep-seated, secular transformations in the materiality of global capitalism’ that may well point to ‘a deeper transformation in the form of the state and its relation to capital, which may in turn imprint the future of capitalism with a distinctly new flavour’ (15). To explain it, we must carefully identify the ‘concrete temporal and spatial parameters of [its] current instantiations’ (5), and theorize it as ‘a process which is global in scope and nature (12), understanding its political and institutional forms ‘together and in relation to each other in a co-constitutive movement’, and seeing their joint and concurrent or aggregate expansion as ‘a world-historical totality’ (13). That is to say, their goal is to grasp ‘the inner nature of the new state capitalism as a variegated, world-historical phenomenon’ (emphasis mine), and reinvigorate ‘systemic explanations for its rise and significance across the spaces of the world capitalist economy’ (14). They unequivocally argue, then, that state capitalism shapes and defines the current ‘world-historical totality’.
Here is a useful opening summary of the argument developed at length in Chapter 3:
‘First, we submit that state capitalism must not be seen as an anomaly or a deviance from liberal, market-based capitalism, but as a particular modality of expression of the capitalist state, including in its liberal form. State capitalism is an immanent potentiality, an impulse which is contained in the form of the capitalist state and built into its DNA. This allows us redirecting characterization efforts (sic) away from constructing ideal-typical models of state capitalism juxtaposed to other (conventional) varieties of capitalism, and towards identifying the circumstances and conditions in which this potentiality is actualized, as well as its concrete temporal and spatial parameters. In other words, state capitalism must be defined with reference to concrete historical-geographical capitalist transformations, and in relation to inherited geographies of state intervention into social and economic processes. Second, the coming into being of state capitalism must not be explained by resorting to mechanical-abstract metaphors, such as the negation of an abstract model of free-market capitalism, a Polanyian pendulum (i.e., a counter-movement of the state somehow automatically following a period of market expansion), or axiomatic and historically indeterminate laws of peripheral catch-up development. Rather, we must locate state capitalist impulses within a set of determinate processes and social relations pertaining to the historical development and geographical remaking of global capitalism. Third, our proposed approach redefines the nature of comparative work away from an exercise in identifying the institutional contours of neatly demarcated territories categorized as state capitalist, and towards relational-comparative work consisting in tracing difference in connection, interdependencies, and co-evolution between different instantiations and repertoires of state action (Hart 2018; Sparke 2020). This, we argue, is essential to grasping the inner nature of the new state capitalism as a variegated, world-historical totality, and capturing the dialectical and cumulative unfolding of different modalities of state intervention across space, scale, and time. We call this “uneven and combined state capitalism”’ (17).
The further development of this perspective in Chapter 3 is preceded by a chapter-long review of literature in the fields of strategic management, comparative capitalism, and global political economy. Even in the latter, though, the focus is on the state, rather than the contemporary global political economy. Alami and Dixon insist, uncontroversially, on the need for a robust theory of the state in capitalist society, a periodization of its role over time, and greater attention to territorial and geographical considerations (40-49).
It is in Chapter Three that the fundamentally incoherent character of the enterprise becomes apparent. Alami and Dixon seek to achieve flexibility by means of an open-ended problématique of state capitalism linked to the notion of uneven and combined development and the (geo)political re-organization of global capitalism, but not dictated by a rigid model. But as we quickly see, this is an empty gesture. They announce that they intend to ‘construe state capitalism not as a static categorical construct or rigidly defined model, but as a flexible means of problematizing and critically interrogating the object of inquiry which we have delineated in the introduction of this book, that is, the current aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital across the spaces of the world capitalist economy’, adding that ‘more than a fully formed concept or rigidly defined model we see state capitalism as a “sensitizing device” to help us address the series of theoretical, political, and, as we will see, geographical conundrums raised by this upward trajectory in the repertoires of state intervention’ (52). This is patently contradictory. In principle the idea of ‘state capitalism’ could be a flexible ‘sensitizing device’, but in practice it is deployed to explore the already fully formed concept and rigidly defined model of really existing state capitalism as co-constituted by state-capital hybrids and muscular forms of statism, and set on an upward trajectory reflected in the expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the spaces of the world capitalist economy. Their ‘flexible’ method is mortgaged in advance to an inflexible conclusion.
What follows is predictable – a one-sided analysis rooted in a broadly realist geopolitics, tricked out and complicated by invocations of a range of formulations and theories reflecting alternative perspectives, all of which fall by the wayside in the end in the one-dimensional account to which Alami and Dixon adhere. It culminates in the notion of a ‘spiral of state capitalism’, which is purely an artefact of their insistence on explaining the ‘totality’ exclusively in terms of interactions between states. So after a review of literature on the state chiefly notable for dismissing Miliband, Poulantzas, Offe, Jessop, Bieler and Morton and sundry others with the judgement that these ‘various strands of writing on the state hold considerable potential, largely untapped so far’ (56) they recognize formally, citing Simon Clarke, John Holloway and Pete Burnham in support, that ‘the state’s room of manoeuvre for securing conditions for accumulation is restricted by and subordinated to the conditions imposed by the movement of expanded capitalist reproduction as a whole, and it is conditioned by a context of interstate competition’, so that ‘states interact with each other as they attempt to foster global capital accumulation (which is beneficial to all states) while simultaneously competing to improve their respective position in a highly uneven and hierarchical world market and attract capital in their own domestic territory’ (58), but they continue regardless to accord analytical priority to the second term in each case despite the priority this formulation accords to the first. They then affect to follow Charnock and Starosta (2018: 325) in putting ‘labour, and its historically changing forms of existence, at the centre of the theorization and analysis of uneven international development’ (67, emphasis mine), and it would be good if they had. But they don’t. Their model cannot accommodate either ‘expanded capitalist reproduction as a whole’, or an analysis that places labour at the centre. So their various theoretical excursions change nothing, and the opening lines of Chapter Four confirm that the original rigid model of state capitalism has survived unscathed:
‘Let us now put to work the conceptual framework developed in the previous chapter. Specifically, we will aim to answer the following questions: What are the processes and relations pertaining to the historical development and geographical remaking of global capitalism which underpin the recent aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital? What are the political economic transformations undergirding this historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention on a global scale, and especially the co-expansion of state-capital hybrids and of muscular forms of statism?’ (77).
State capitalism, rather than the movement of expanded capitalist reproduction as a whole, remains the object of study: ‘Our main claim is that the fundamental sources of present-day state capitalism are to be found in two world-historical economic mutations, both of which stem from determinate material transformations in the capitalist labour process and changing forms of labour exploitation: on the one hand, the emergence of a more complex constellation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ international divisions of labour; and on the other, deep-seated tendencies towards economic stagnation and industrial overcapacity’ (ibid, emphasis mine). These are said to have given rise to ‘productivist’, ‘absorptive’, ‘stabilizing’, and ‘disciplinary’ state capitalist impulses (78). Dealing with these in turn leads them repeatedly into empirical detail that is conspicuously not co-constituted by state-hybrids and muscular forms of statism, and to name-checks to alternative theoretical perspectives, notably the intensification of ‘the coercive laws of world market competition’ (100), but they maintain their one-sided perspective regardless, as most strikingly revealed in the section on ‘disciplinary’ state capitalist impulses (104-7).
The ’disciplinary’ impulse, they say, ‘encompasses a double logic. On the one hand, it refers to the disciplining of a state’s own domestic social relations in line with the competitive imperatives of global capitalism. On the other, it designates muscular attempts on the part of governments to shift the burden of economic adjustment to other states, and/or to engage in aggressive forms of geopolitics which actively mobilize economic power. These two aspects of the disciplinary state capitalist impulse, the domestic and the geo-economic one, are intimately connected, both on a material and ideological level’ (104).
There are actually three aspects here, not two. On the first, ‘the disciplining of a state’s own domestic social relations in line with the competitive imperatives of global capitalism’, they seem entirely unaware that the primary form this has taken for the last forty years, strongly advocated and supported by relevant international institutions, has been a systematic effort on the part of states to expose their own population and social classes, capitalists and workers alike, to those competitive imperatives in line with what I have called a ‘politics of competitiveness’ (Cammack 2022). The relevant policies – from the reform of the welfare state to make work pay to the virtual abolition of the ‘standard employment contract’ and the trashing of workers’ rights – all bear witness to the operation of a ‘muscular’ state, but one that pursues policies antithetical to the state capitalist practices suggested by the second aspect, attempts on the part of governments to shift the burden of economic adjustment to other states. Omission of these themes is the greatest weakness of the book. The third aspect – the mobilization of economic power for geopolitical ends – is different again, and in fact has an indeterminate relationship to the competitive imperatives of global capitalism: Alami and Dixon give the example of the ‘all-out financial war launched by Western capitalist economies against the Russian state in retaliation for its war of aggression in Ukraine’ and note that ‘such assertive forms of economic nationalism … collapse the distinction between economic interest and national security’, but they seem oblivious to the fact that they have slipped out of one theoretical framework into another (104).
And so it goes on. Chapter 5 lumps ‘peer group learning and mimetic behaviour’ and ‘enabling and mutual reinforcement’ together with ‘geopolitically driven competitive emulation’, first overlooking the fact that the ‘whip of necessity’ has driven states much more in recent decades to policies that promote global competitiveness than to those that resist it, then perversely suggesting that evidence of cooperation between states, including ‘formal mechanisms … to produce and exchange policy knowledge, ideas, experiences, and best practices’ (121) supports their argument. They might want to look at the way in which the OECD has developed peer review and peer-to-peer learning among its members over more than sixty years as a mechanism to combat protectionism in particular and state capitalist practices such as those identified here in general, and to promote competitiveness (Cammack 2022: Chapter Two). As it is, though, all their examples tend in the same pre-ordained direction, allowing them to identify ‘mutually reinforcing trajectories’ with a ‘combinatory, multiplier effect in state capitalism, insofar as they facilitate the consolidation, deepening, or further extension of state prerogatives over time’ (129). Other mutually reinforcing trajectories are available, as pointed out above, but Alami and Dixon do not want to know. They again claim to have introduced ‘a sense of open-endedness, contingency, and a more processual understanding of the multiple trajectories that make up contemporary state capitalism’, only to return immediately to their rigid model, throwing their chips behind the notion of a ‘tendential dynamic which resemble (sic) the movement of a spiral’ (138), whose movements widen ‘inasmuch as state restructuring intensifies, and state-capital hybrids and muscular forms of statism proliferate across geographic space’ (139).
Chapter 6 then turns directly to state-capital hybrids, noting at the outset that they ‘not only participate in what is supposedly private market activity but do so in a commercial manner’ (143). It is empirically informative about these entities, but because it reduces ‘the historical development and remaking of global capitalism’ to their activity, it produces an inadequate account. As always, the focus on ‘broader capitalist transformations’ is rigidly selective: ‘The originality of our approach resides in that we conceive of organizational change as resulting from state-capital hybrids’ strategies to address operational dilemmas, thereby emphasizing their agency, which we firmly situate within broader capitalist transformations, notably concerning the state’s role as owner of capital and as investor-shareholder’ (155, emphasis mine). Chapter 7 discusses discourse and ideology in the same spirit, prioritizing geopolitical concerns over class relations.
Chapter 8 then attempts to show that leading multilateral and supranational development actors (IMF, World Bank, OECD, UNCTAD and the G20) have warmed a little to the idea of state action, while retaining their strongly pro-market orientations. Alami and Dixon do not push the argument too far, suggesting that these organizations ‘acknowledge, albeit not unambiguously and often reluctantly, that national development and policy banks have become major Development actors and are here to stay’ (204), and noting that they see the rise in state capitalism as problematic’ (217). Even so, I am sceptical. To give just one example, they summarize one aspect of the shift that has taken place as follows: ‘throughout the 1990s, modernizing state-capital hybrids simply meant privatizing them (under almost any circumstance). By contrast, in the twenty-first century, modernizing state-capital hybrids means turning them into organizations that mimic the practices and organizational goals of comparable private-sector entities, adopt the techniques of liberal governance, and are broadly market-confirming’ (226). But the Thematic Guidance Note: Restructuring State-Owned Enterprises (World Bank 2021), a key element in the Bank’s Integrated State-Owned Enterprises Framework (iSOEF) to which Alami and Dixon refer in some detail, opens with the summary view that: ‘In many countries, the SOE sector has been plagued by operational and financial problems and is a source of contingent liabilities for the State. Many SOEs have posted large losses, are heavily indebted and have built up significant trade, tax and other types of arrears. Many have also underperformed in terms of their public service delivery’ (vii). It identifies five possible reform paths. The first, to liberalize the SOE’s market by opening it up to competition from new entrants, is precisely what the Bank proposed in China forty years ago. The second and third are ‘partially divest or privatize’, and ‘liquidate/close down the SOE’. The fourth, in cases where the SOE ‘has an important non-commercial public service function and no longer engages or plans to engage in commercial activities’, reads: ‘After closing down or divesting from commercial activities using the options above, transform the SOE into a parastatal entity or transfer its residual (non-commercial) activities to the central administration’. Fifth and last, and only in the case where the SOE ‘has commercial activities for which government has determined state ownership remains the best option in the foreseeable future’, the Bank recommends: ‘Fully corporatize and restructure the SOE as needed’. And it adds: ‘The focus of this thematic guidance note is limited to the last option above, i.e., to the processes used to restructure those SOEs that will remain in State hands. But in adopting this, the note takes account of lessons learned during recent decades of experience with SOE restructuring and fully acknowledges that, without accompanying safeguards, SOEs can distort markets, stifle competition and growth, and impose a heavy burden on public finances. The recommendations for SOE restructuring processes, and particularly for accompanying measures, include actions to minimize these risks’ (ibid, 1-2). In other words, the Guidance Note specifically addresses the problematic circumstance in which the government will not consider any alternative to continuing operation under state control, and seeks to limit the damage. Nothing that Alami and Dixon find contradicts the idea that these organizations ‘embody and enforce a universal class project centred on embedding global competitiveness’, a perspective on which they kindly cite my own work (229). Their added comment, that they ‘remain permeated by geopolitical forcefields’ overstates the case – ‘operate in the context of’ might be more accurate. In any case, the fact remains that their first priority is to see to it as far as they can that the law of value operates on a global scale. And that takes us back to Carroll and Jarvis: it is a big mistake to delink phenomena associated with the return of the state from understanding the state in a socio-relational sense and tied to patterns of accumulation under late capitalism (2022: 1716). I concur entirely with the judgement that follows: ‘We … take exception with the reification and representation of an NSC in general which we see as generally dwarfed by the subordination of countries within the disciplinary binds and contradictions of late capitalism’ (ibid: 1716-7).
State capitalism has no ‘inner nature’, relational or otherwise (14, 17, 71), so I am not surprised that Alami and Dixon abandon the quest to find one. The best way to examine the varied concrete phenomena they identify under the headings of state-capital hybrids and muscular forms of statism is to analyse and specify first the ‘conditions imposed by the movement of expanded capitalist reproduction as a whole’, as they are intermittently aware. Then state capitalist practices need to be examined in the first instance at the level of the individual state, in order to identify their conjunctural and situational logic from case to case. Each configuration will be unique. As for the aggregate outcome – and here I agree with the speculative conclusion to the book – it is too soon to tell.
References
Alami, Ilias, and Dixon, Adam D. 2020a. ‘State capitalism(s) redux? Theories, tensions, controversies’. Competition & Change, 24, 1, 70–94.
Alami, Ilias, and Dixon, Adam D. 2020b. The strange geographies of the “new” state capitalism. Political Geography, 82, 1-12.
Alami, Ilias, Adam D. Dixon and Emma Mawdsley. 2021. ‘State capitalism and the new global D/development regime’. Antipode, 53, 5, 1294-1318.
Alami, Ilias, Adam Dixon and Emma Mawdsley. 2022. ‘Intervention—“Debating Contemporary State Capitalism: A Reply to Carroll and Jarvis”’, at https://antipodeonline.org/2022/08/04/debating-contemporary-state-capitalism/
Cammack, Paul. 2010. ‘The shape of capitalism to come’. Antipode, 4, s1), 262–280.
Cammack, Paul. 2022. The Politics of Global Competitiveness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carroll, Toby and Darryl Jarvis. 2022. ‘Understanding the State in relation to Late Capitalism: A Response to “New” State Capitalism Contributions’, Antipode, 54, 6, 1715-1737.
Charnock, Greig, and Guido Starosta. 2018. ‘Towards a “unified field theory” of uneven development: Human productive subjectivity, capital and the international’. Global Society, 32, 3, 324– 343.
Hart, Gillian. 2018. ‘Relational comparison revisited: Marxist postcolonial geographies in practice∗’.
Progress in Human Geography, 42, 3, 371–394.
Sparke, M. 2020. ‘Comparing and connecting territories of illiberal politics and neoliberal governance’. Territory, Politics, Governance, 8, 1, 95–99.
van Apeldoorn, B., and N. de Graaff. 2022. The state in global capitalism before and after the
COVID-19 crisis. Contemporary Politics, 28, 3, 306–327.
World Bank. 2021. Thematic Guidance Note: Restructuring State-Owned Enterprises. Washington DC: World Bank.
Alami and Dixon have plenty to say on ‘patterns of accumulation under late capitalism’, but none of it affects their analytical framework, which brings together a number of different institutional forms (sovereign wealth funds, policy and development banks, state enterprises, and state-private partnerships), and political or policy orientations (techno-industrial policy, spatial development strategies, and economic nationalism), grouped under the headings of state-capital hybrids and muscular forms of statism respectively. They argue that these ‘co-constitute’ state capitalism (Figure 1.1, p. 14). In short, ‘a particular set of contradictions characteristic of our current capitalist epoch’ (2) have brought about ‘a historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention’ marked by ‘the drastic reconfiguration and expansion of the role of the state as promotor, supervisor, and owner of capital’ (7). The transformations involved are potentially epoch-defining, structured by ‘deep-seated, secular transformations in the materiality of global capitalism’ that may well point to ‘a deeper transformation in the form of the state and its relation to capital, which may in turn imprint the future of capitalism with a distinctly new flavour’ (15). To explain it, we must carefully identify the ‘concrete temporal and spatial parameters of [its] current instantiations’ (5), and theorize it as ‘a process which is global in scope and nature (12), understanding its political and institutional forms ‘together and in relation to each other in a co-constitutive movement’, and seeing their joint and concurrent or aggregate expansion as ‘a world-historical totality’ (13). That is to say, their goal is to grasp ‘the inner nature of the new state capitalism as a variegated, world-historical phenomenon’ (emphasis mine), and reinvigorate ‘systemic explanations for its rise and significance across the spaces of the world capitalist economy’ (14). They unequivocally argue, then, that state capitalism shapes and defines the current ‘world-historical totality’.
Here is a useful opening summary of the argument developed at length in Chapter 3:
‘First, we submit that state capitalism must not be seen as an anomaly or a deviance from liberal, market-based capitalism, but as a particular modality of expression of the capitalist state, including in its liberal form. State capitalism is an immanent potentiality, an impulse which is contained in the form of the capitalist state and built into its DNA. This allows us redirecting characterization efforts (sic) away from constructing ideal-typical models of state capitalism juxtaposed to other (conventional) varieties of capitalism, and towards identifying the circumstances and conditions in which this potentiality is actualized, as well as its concrete temporal and spatial parameters. In other words, state capitalism must be defined with reference to concrete historical-geographical capitalist transformations, and in relation to inherited geographies of state intervention into social and economic processes. Second, the coming into being of state capitalism must not be explained by resorting to mechanical-abstract metaphors, such as the negation of an abstract model of free-market capitalism, a Polanyian pendulum (i.e., a counter-movement of the state somehow automatically following a period of market expansion), or axiomatic and historically indeterminate laws of peripheral catch-up development. Rather, we must locate state capitalist impulses within a set of determinate processes and social relations pertaining to the historical development and geographical remaking of global capitalism. Third, our proposed approach redefines the nature of comparative work away from an exercise in identifying the institutional contours of neatly demarcated territories categorized as state capitalist, and towards relational-comparative work consisting in tracing difference in connection, interdependencies, and co-evolution between different instantiations and repertoires of state action (Hart 2018; Sparke 2020). This, we argue, is essential to grasping the inner nature of the new state capitalism as a variegated, world-historical totality, and capturing the dialectical and cumulative unfolding of different modalities of state intervention across space, scale, and time. We call this “uneven and combined state capitalism”’ (17).
The further development of this perspective in Chapter 3 is preceded by a chapter-long review of literature in the fields of strategic management, comparative capitalism, and global political economy. Even in the latter, though, the focus is on the state, rather than the contemporary global political economy. Alami and Dixon insist, uncontroversially, on the need for a robust theory of the state in capitalist society, a periodization of its role over time, and greater attention to territorial and geographical considerations (40-49).
It is in Chapter Three that the fundamentally incoherent character of the enterprise becomes apparent. Alami and Dixon seek to achieve flexibility by means of an open-ended problématique of state capitalism linked to the notion of uneven and combined development and the (geo)political re-organization of global capitalism, but not dictated by a rigid model. But as we quickly see, this is an empty gesture. They announce that they intend to ‘construe state capitalism not as a static categorical construct or rigidly defined model, but as a flexible means of problematizing and critically interrogating the object of inquiry which we have delineated in the introduction of this book, that is, the current aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital across the spaces of the world capitalist economy’, adding that ‘more than a fully formed concept or rigidly defined model we see state capitalism as a “sensitizing device” to help us address the series of theoretical, political, and, as we will see, geographical conundrums raised by this upward trajectory in the repertoires of state intervention’ (52). This is patently contradictory. In principle the idea of ‘state capitalism’ could be a flexible ‘sensitizing device’, but in practice it is deployed to explore the already fully formed concept and rigidly defined model of really existing state capitalism as co-constituted by state-capital hybrids and muscular forms of statism, and set on an upward trajectory reflected in the expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the spaces of the world capitalist economy. Their ‘flexible’ method is mortgaged in advance to an inflexible conclusion.
What follows is predictable – a one-sided analysis rooted in a broadly realist geopolitics, tricked out and complicated by invocations of a range of formulations and theories reflecting alternative perspectives, all of which fall by the wayside in the end in the one-dimensional account to which Alami and Dixon adhere. It culminates in the notion of a ‘spiral of state capitalism’, which is purely an artefact of their insistence on explaining the ‘totality’ exclusively in terms of interactions between states. So after a review of literature on the state chiefly notable for dismissing Miliband, Poulantzas, Offe, Jessop, Bieler and Morton and sundry others with the judgement that these ‘various strands of writing on the state hold considerable potential, largely untapped so far’ (56) they recognize formally, citing Simon Clarke, John Holloway and Pete Burnham in support, that ‘the state’s room of manoeuvre for securing conditions for accumulation is restricted by and subordinated to the conditions imposed by the movement of expanded capitalist reproduction as a whole, and it is conditioned by a context of interstate competition’, so that ‘states interact with each other as they attempt to foster global capital accumulation (which is beneficial to all states) while simultaneously competing to improve their respective position in a highly uneven and hierarchical world market and attract capital in their own domestic territory’ (58), but they continue regardless to accord analytical priority to the second term in each case despite the priority this formulation accords to the first. They then affect to follow Charnock and Starosta (2018: 325) in putting ‘labour, and its historically changing forms of existence, at the centre of the theorization and analysis of uneven international development’ (67, emphasis mine), and it would be good if they had. But they don’t. Their model cannot accommodate either ‘expanded capitalist reproduction as a whole’, or an analysis that places labour at the centre. So their various theoretical excursions change nothing, and the opening lines of Chapter Four confirm that the original rigid model of state capitalism has survived unscathed:
‘Let us now put to work the conceptual framework developed in the previous chapter. Specifically, we will aim to answer the following questions: What are the processes and relations pertaining to the historical development and geographical remaking of global capitalism which underpin the recent aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital? What are the political economic transformations undergirding this historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention on a global scale, and especially the co-expansion of state-capital hybrids and of muscular forms of statism?’ (77).
State capitalism, rather than the movement of expanded capitalist reproduction as a whole, remains the object of study: ‘Our main claim is that the fundamental sources of present-day state capitalism are to be found in two world-historical economic mutations, both of which stem from determinate material transformations in the capitalist labour process and changing forms of labour exploitation: on the one hand, the emergence of a more complex constellation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ international divisions of labour; and on the other, deep-seated tendencies towards economic stagnation and industrial overcapacity’ (ibid, emphasis mine). These are said to have given rise to ‘productivist’, ‘absorptive’, ‘stabilizing’, and ‘disciplinary’ state capitalist impulses (78). Dealing with these in turn leads them repeatedly into empirical detail that is conspicuously not co-constituted by state-hybrids and muscular forms of statism, and to name-checks to alternative theoretical perspectives, notably the intensification of ‘the coercive laws of world market competition’ (100), but they maintain their one-sided perspective regardless, as most strikingly revealed in the section on ‘disciplinary’ state capitalist impulses (104-7).
The ’disciplinary’ impulse, they say, ‘encompasses a double logic. On the one hand, it refers to the disciplining of a state’s own domestic social relations in line with the competitive imperatives of global capitalism. On the other, it designates muscular attempts on the part of governments to shift the burden of economic adjustment to other states, and/or to engage in aggressive forms of geopolitics which actively mobilize economic power. These two aspects of the disciplinary state capitalist impulse, the domestic and the geo-economic one, are intimately connected, both on a material and ideological level’ (104).
There are actually three aspects here, not two. On the first, ‘the disciplining of a state’s own domestic social relations in line with the competitive imperatives of global capitalism’, they seem entirely unaware that the primary form this has taken for the last forty years, strongly advocated and supported by relevant international institutions, has been a systematic effort on the part of states to expose their own population and social classes, capitalists and workers alike, to those competitive imperatives in line with what I have called a ‘politics of competitiveness’ (Cammack 2022). The relevant policies – from the reform of the welfare state to make work pay to the virtual abolition of the ‘standard employment contract’ and the trashing of workers’ rights – all bear witness to the operation of a ‘muscular’ state, but one that pursues policies antithetical to the state capitalist practices suggested by the second aspect, attempts on the part of governments to shift the burden of economic adjustment to other states. Omission of these themes is the greatest weakness of the book. The third aspect – the mobilization of economic power for geopolitical ends – is different again, and in fact has an indeterminate relationship to the competitive imperatives of global capitalism: Alami and Dixon give the example of the ‘all-out financial war launched by Western capitalist economies against the Russian state in retaliation for its war of aggression in Ukraine’ and note that ‘such assertive forms of economic nationalism … collapse the distinction between economic interest and national security’, but they seem oblivious to the fact that they have slipped out of one theoretical framework into another (104).
And so it goes on. Chapter 5 lumps ‘peer group learning and mimetic behaviour’ and ‘enabling and mutual reinforcement’ together with ‘geopolitically driven competitive emulation’, first overlooking the fact that the ‘whip of necessity’ has driven states much more in recent decades to policies that promote global competitiveness than to those that resist it, then perversely suggesting that evidence of cooperation between states, including ‘formal mechanisms … to produce and exchange policy knowledge, ideas, experiences, and best practices’ (121) supports their argument. They might want to look at the way in which the OECD has developed peer review and peer-to-peer learning among its members over more than sixty years as a mechanism to combat protectionism in particular and state capitalist practices such as those identified here in general, and to promote competitiveness (Cammack 2022: Chapter Two). As it is, though, all their examples tend in the same pre-ordained direction, allowing them to identify ‘mutually reinforcing trajectories’ with a ‘combinatory, multiplier effect in state capitalism, insofar as they facilitate the consolidation, deepening, or further extension of state prerogatives over time’ (129). Other mutually reinforcing trajectories are available, as pointed out above, but Alami and Dixon do not want to know. They again claim to have introduced ‘a sense of open-endedness, contingency, and a more processual understanding of the multiple trajectories that make up contemporary state capitalism’, only to return immediately to their rigid model, throwing their chips behind the notion of a ‘tendential dynamic which resemble (sic) the movement of a spiral’ (138), whose movements widen ‘inasmuch as state restructuring intensifies, and state-capital hybrids and muscular forms of statism proliferate across geographic space’ (139).
Chapter 6 then turns directly to state-capital hybrids, noting at the outset that they ‘not only participate in what is supposedly private market activity but do so in a commercial manner’ (143). It is empirically informative about these entities, but because it reduces ‘the historical development and remaking of global capitalism’ to their activity, it produces an inadequate account. As always, the focus on ‘broader capitalist transformations’ is rigidly selective: ‘The originality of our approach resides in that we conceive of organizational change as resulting from state-capital hybrids’ strategies to address operational dilemmas, thereby emphasizing their agency, which we firmly situate within broader capitalist transformations, notably concerning the state’s role as owner of capital and as investor-shareholder’ (155, emphasis mine). Chapter 7 discusses discourse and ideology in the same spirit, prioritizing geopolitical concerns over class relations.
Chapter 8 then attempts to show that leading multilateral and supranational development actors (IMF, World Bank, OECD, UNCTAD and the G20) have warmed a little to the idea of state action, while retaining their strongly pro-market orientations. Alami and Dixon do not push the argument too far, suggesting that these organizations ‘acknowledge, albeit not unambiguously and often reluctantly, that national development and policy banks have become major Development actors and are here to stay’ (204), and noting that they see the rise in state capitalism as problematic’ (217). Even so, I am sceptical. To give just one example, they summarize one aspect of the shift that has taken place as follows: ‘throughout the 1990s, modernizing state-capital hybrids simply meant privatizing them (under almost any circumstance). By contrast, in the twenty-first century, modernizing state-capital hybrids means turning them into organizations that mimic the practices and organizational goals of comparable private-sector entities, adopt the techniques of liberal governance, and are broadly market-confirming’ (226). But the Thematic Guidance Note: Restructuring State-Owned Enterprises (World Bank 2021), a key element in the Bank’s Integrated State-Owned Enterprises Framework (iSOEF) to which Alami and Dixon refer in some detail, opens with the summary view that: ‘In many countries, the SOE sector has been plagued by operational and financial problems and is a source of contingent liabilities for the State. Many SOEs have posted large losses, are heavily indebted and have built up significant trade, tax and other types of arrears. Many have also underperformed in terms of their public service delivery’ (vii). It identifies five possible reform paths. The first, to liberalize the SOE’s market by opening it up to competition from new entrants, is precisely what the Bank proposed in China forty years ago. The second and third are ‘partially divest or privatize’, and ‘liquidate/close down the SOE’. The fourth, in cases where the SOE ‘has an important non-commercial public service function and no longer engages or plans to engage in commercial activities’, reads: ‘After closing down or divesting from commercial activities using the options above, transform the SOE into a parastatal entity or transfer its residual (non-commercial) activities to the central administration’. Fifth and last, and only in the case where the SOE ‘has commercial activities for which government has determined state ownership remains the best option in the foreseeable future’, the Bank recommends: ‘Fully corporatize and restructure the SOE as needed’. And it adds: ‘The focus of this thematic guidance note is limited to the last option above, i.e., to the processes used to restructure those SOEs that will remain in State hands. But in adopting this, the note takes account of lessons learned during recent decades of experience with SOE restructuring and fully acknowledges that, without accompanying safeguards, SOEs can distort markets, stifle competition and growth, and impose a heavy burden on public finances. The recommendations for SOE restructuring processes, and particularly for accompanying measures, include actions to minimize these risks’ (ibid, 1-2). In other words, the Guidance Note specifically addresses the problematic circumstance in which the government will not consider any alternative to continuing operation under state control, and seeks to limit the damage. Nothing that Alami and Dixon find contradicts the idea that these organizations ‘embody and enforce a universal class project centred on embedding global competitiveness’, a perspective on which they kindly cite my own work (229). Their added comment, that they ‘remain permeated by geopolitical forcefields’ overstates the case – ‘operate in the context of’ might be more accurate. In any case, the fact remains that their first priority is to see to it as far as they can that the law of value operates on a global scale. And that takes us back to Carroll and Jarvis: it is a big mistake to delink phenomena associated with the return of the state from understanding the state in a socio-relational sense and tied to patterns of accumulation under late capitalism (2022: 1716). I concur entirely with the judgement that follows: ‘We … take exception with the reification and representation of an NSC in general which we see as generally dwarfed by the subordination of countries within the disciplinary binds and contradictions of late capitalism’ (ibid: 1716-7).
State capitalism has no ‘inner nature’, relational or otherwise (14, 17, 71), so I am not surprised that Alami and Dixon abandon the quest to find one. The best way to examine the varied concrete phenomena they identify under the headings of state-capital hybrids and muscular forms of statism is to analyse and specify first the ‘conditions imposed by the movement of expanded capitalist reproduction as a whole’, as they are intermittently aware. Then state capitalist practices need to be examined in the first instance at the level of the individual state, in order to identify their conjunctural and situational logic from case to case. Each configuration will be unique. As for the aggregate outcome – and here I agree with the speculative conclusion to the book – it is too soon to tell.
References
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