In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

107 Chapter Five Capital, Labour, State & Class Struggle Overview The transformations or attempted ‘counter-reforms’ of the neoliberal global ruling classes clash with the cumulative social benefits of the working class, and create objective conditions for a new wave of class struggles. The challenge is to unify the intentionally nursed sectorial struggles of the unemployed workers, the underpaid women workers, the precarious workers, the pensioners, the immigrants, the traditional factory workers and the new machine operatives in the public sector into a new working class power against the new authoritarian state and its national and international rulers. Back to the Future Historical hindsight is instructive here. When colonialist forces created states in their own images, they re-founded institutions that organize social structures in line with their strategies. When, after decolonization, many of these states in Africa and the Middle East weakened under military or neoliberal assaults; they were dubbed ill-governed or ‘overdeveloped.’ The ‘or’ between military and neoliberal is inclusive. The neoliberal bent is imposed by shifting national class structures to accept the imperialist terms of surrender via neoliberal policies by power structures, foremost in which, is actual or potential military power. As for overdeveloped, it is said that excolonies borrowed over-fitted systems of government and administration from their Western patrons. More recently, many of these ex-colonies have failed and many others teeter on the brink of failure. Libya, Yemen and Syria can now be added to Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iraq. However, these failures are not a onetime occurrence after which states resurrect in better shape or form. They have become states that exist in a continual condition of violence and collapse. After the destruction of their indigenous industry and national means for the reproduction of life, they are relegated to a condition of insecurity, dependency and the export of raw materials. Global capitalist forces ensure 108 that rent from resources are devolved in ways that entrench divisions across social groups that, in turn, vie for raw material or geopolitical rents. In this new breed of states, the state is neither an institution of all institutions nor an institution in itself. It just administers rent redistribution and protects vital raw material sources for uncaring capitalist charks. Iraq recently, for instance, bought drones to protect its pipelines when more than one million of its orphaned children are stranded in the streets of Baghdad and daily car bombs wreak havoc and destruction across its landscape. This new breed of state is neither sovereign, in the sense it cannot provide national, communal or individual security, nor does it exercise autonomy over policy. It is simply there to ensure continued divisions so as not to facilitate the aspirations of working people irrespective of sex, colour, gender, sect etc., in a more resistant stance to contemporary global capitalism. As models engineered in response to the crisis of capital, they are instruments of working class differentiation and control. And, the possibility exists that there could be more of these states now. What occurred in Iraq and Libya can engulf all of Africa. In the post-Soviet era, the old form of the sovereign and nationally industrializing state no longer tallies with presentday global capitalist ambitions. In an organically set mode of capital accumulation, when some states break the mould of underdevelopment, others will pay a heavy price of underdevelopment. At its peak in the eighteenth century, the state was ideally conceptualized. The nation state was ‘the realization of the spirit’ or ‘the actuality of the ethical idea (Hegel).’ It was also ‘[a]n autonomous state, one in which the authority of its laws is in the will of the people in that state (Kant).’ By the time class divisions deepened in the nineteenth century, the state became ‘the institution of organized violence which is used by the ruling class to maintain the conditions of its rule (Marx) or, putatively, ‘the organization that monopolises legitimate violence over a given territory (Weber).’ In our age of colonialist intervention couched under humanitarianism, the state became a social club modelled upon the fagging system of English public schools. Late in the twentieth century, the concept of the state had to annul the concept of class altogether from the definition of state. The state became an association of persons, living in a determinate part of the earth’s surface, legally organized and personified, and associated for their own government. This new breed of state, however, fits none of the above definitions. It is a differentiated and degenerative...

Share