State and capital: a marxist debate

The present crisis of capitalism has focussed attention on the urgent need for an adequate understanding of the state and its relation to the processes of capitalist accumulation. An analysis of the correspondence between the content of state activity and the interests of the ruling class has proved inadequate for an understanding of political development.

Since the late sixties Marxist circles in Germany have been attempting to create a framework for a more rigorous study of the state. In undertaking to forge a link between the existence and development of the state and the nature and development of capital, they relate the forms and functions of the state to the nature of capitalism as a whole. Controversy. therefore, centres on the nature of these forms and functions and how they can be related to which aspects of capitalism. This analysis is seen as an essential step towards any concrete empirical investigation.

The editors' introduction delineates the methodological issues involved and provides a theoretical context for the terminology of contemporary German Marxist analysis. Little of the material prebleiere has previously been the in English. It comprises some of major contributions to the debate on the derivation of the state and its elaboration of the scientific categories developed by Marx towards a materialist theory of the bourgeois state and its development. This book does not merely represent a German school in the theoretical work on the state but a fundamental critique of those theories which are often considered in Britain to represent Marxist theory.