The Marx Revival and State Theory: Towards a Negative-Dialectical Critical Social

Theory of the State1

This is the non-copyedited version of a chapter that is forthcoming in Rob Hunter, Rafael

Khatchaturian, Eva Napolous (eds). 2023, Marxism and the Capitalist State: Towards a New

Debate. London: Springer.

Chris O’Kane

Introduction

The 2007 financial crisis led to the revival of Marxist theory, leading to the development of two

broad approaches to Marxism, the state, and socialist strategy. In the years immediately

following the financial crisis a number of Marxist theorists—notably Aaron Benanav and

Endnotes (2010), and Paul Mattick, Jr (2011)—focused on developing revolutionary theories of

the unfolding crisis. However, the predominant role that the crisis played in these theories meant

that the state was primarily criticized for its inability to counteract the ongoing secular crisis of

capitalism. Several years later, the rise to prominence of democratic socialism led to the

proliferation of state theories premised on theorizing democratic socialist strategy (see Tarnoff

2018; Day 2018; McCarthy 2019; Maher and Khachaturian 2021). In these theories, the state is

conceived of as a ‘terrain’ of struggle; a means for counteracting crisis and building democratic

socialism. Given these two trajectories, and despite the important developments in value-form

1
I would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments and the editors for their patience and support.

1
theory and critical theory during this time, including Bonefeld (2014; 2021), Smith (2017) and

Reuten (2018)’s work on the state, there has not yet been a critique of the state that both draws

on critical theory and engages with these predominant approaches to the state in the Marx

revival.

This chapter brings critical state theory into the Marx revival by developing a negative-

dialectical critique of the state’s role in the reproduction of the negative totality of capitalist

society. It draws together Horkheimer and Adorno’s Marxian critical theory and its subterranean

lineage: the new readings of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory (see

Bonefeld and O’Kane 2022). This negative-dialectical critique of the state also points to a

number of antitheses and shared assumptions between the revolutionary crisis theory and

democratic socialist theories of the state in the Marx revival that prevents both approaches from

fully grasping the relationship between the state, the reproduction of capitalist society, and its

emancipatory abolition.

The focus on developing a critical state theory that critiques the state by virtue of its

role in the reproduction of the negative totality of capitalist society is tied to my larger research

project on critical theory. This larger research project is concerned with two related areas of

research in critical theory: (1) Reconstructing the development of a heterodox Marxist critical

theory of fetishistic social domination in the negative totality of capitalist society by

Horkheimer, Adorno, Schmidt, Backhaus, Reichelt, Postone and Bonefeld and (2) developing

my own critical theory of the fetishistic social domination of negative totality that draws on

these and other figures to criticise contemporary political economy and critical theory and

critique capitalist society. (See O’Kane 2018, 2020, 2021a and 2021b and 2021c, O’Kane and

Munro 2022.) By engaging with the two predominant contemporary approaches to state theory

2
in the Marx revival from the perspective of my newly developed idea of the negative dialectical

critique of the state, this contribution draws on and further develops this larger research

project on critical theory, while also bringing these areas of research to bear on contemporary

Marxist state theory.

However, I want to highlight that what follows is not intended as an authoritative critique

of either the revolutionary crisis or democratic socialist theory of the state. Nor do I claim to

provide the definitive negative dialectical critical theory of the state. Space not only prevents me

from pulling off these theoretical feats, but I am also at the initial stages of thinking them

through. This chapter is thus intended to parallel and complement Rob Hunter’s and Kirstin

Munro’s chapters in this book in hopes of reviving and developing a critical social theory of the

state. This chapter’s provisional discussion of the revolutionary crisis and democratic socialist

theories of the state also aims to engage with the other perspectives provided in this book (and

elsewhere) with the aim of starting a comradely debate on the questions of the state, capitalist

society, and its emancipatory transformation.

Part One provides an overview of the two predominant approaches to the state in the

Marx revival—the revolutionary crisis and democratic socialist theories of the state—outlining

how their antithetical theories of the state and socialist strategy are premised on foreshortened

accounts of the relationship between the state and the reproduction of capitalist society. Part Two

discusses the development of criticisms of crisis theory and social democracy, the state, and

capitalist society in Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical theory, and the new readings of the

critique of political economy as a critical social theory. Part Three develops a negative-

dialectical critique that grasps the state’s roles in the reproduction of the negative totality of

3
capitalist society. The conclusion contrasts the negative-dialectical critical social theory of the

state with both the revolutionary crisis theory of the state and the democratic socialist theory of

the state, drawing out their respective shortcomings with regard to grasping the role of the state

in the reproduction of capitalist society. On this basis, the chapter concludes by gesturing

towards a negative dialectical notion of strategy and emancipation.

The revolutionary crisis theory of the state was developed in the early years of the Marx revival

following the 2007 crisis. As the name suggests, this theoretical approach to the state was

articulated in the context of revolutionary crisis theories. Thinkers such as Benanav and

Endnotes (2010), Paul Mattick, Jr (2011), Joshua Clover and Aaron Benanav (2014), among

others, drew on the Marxian crisis theory developed by figures such as Robert Brenner (2006)

and Paul Mattick, Sr (1969) to argue that the 2007 crisis was an expression of the long term

secular crisis of capitalism. So too were the spontaneous global uprisings of the ‘Arab Spring’

and the Occupy Movement in response to the crisis. While the state was an object of

revolutionary abolition, the revolutionary crisis theory of the state did not provide a complex

account of the role that it played in the perpetuation of capitalist society. This was because,

understandably, such a theory focused instead on the inability of states, due to declining revenue,

to effectively counteract crises and stagnation by restoring profitability, which was itself an

expression of the secular crisis tendency of capitalism. Therefore, since short term or long-term

reforms were not possible, revolution was necessary.

What I term the democratic socialist theory of the state responded to and supplanted the

prominence of the revolutionary crisis theory of the state on the basis of markedly different

4
conceptions of crises, the state, socialism, and socialist strategy. According to this perspective,

the formation of neoliberal hegemony following the conjunctural crisis of 1970s led to several

decades of ‘class warfare from above’: corporate and state social and economic policies that

revived profits at the expense of workers’ wages. The bank bailouts and uneven recovery that

characterised the 2007 financial crisis and its aftermath culminated in a crisis of neoliberal

hegemony (see La Botz 2018). This trajectory has led to ‘rising militancy and mobilization’ so

that ‘for the first time in decades, socialism is something more than a subculture’. However,

while ‘socialism is now more than a subculture…it still lacks a mass base’ (Tarnoff 2018). This

is because social democratic parties have supported neoliberalism while ‘vanguardist strategies

that prioritize extra-parliamentary struggles have been unable to build a substantial following

among the working class or advance a credible strategy for socialist transition today’ (Maher and

Khachaturian 2021, 192). Consequently, the democratic socialist theory of the state is coupled

with a ‘credible’ strategy of building such a ‘mass base’ as part of the democratic road to

socialism.

Drawing on Luxemburg, Gramsci, Offe, Wright, and especially Poulantzas, this approach

to democratic socialist strategy (see Tarnoff 2018; Day 2018; McCarthy 2019; Khachaturian and

Maher 2021) grasps the state within a dialectical theory of dual power. Capitalism and socialism

are conceived in terms of which class controls the means of production and the state. On this

basis the state and ‘wider society’ (Tarnoff 2018) are both seen as concurrent terrains of struggle

to build working class power. Hence the election of democratic socialist representatives is

intended to pass ‘non-reformist reforms’, such as Medicare For All or the Green New Deal, that

build political power and empower the working class. At the same time, mass movements and

democratic socialist institutions build ‘popular power’ outside of the state. Taken together this

5
reciprocal process of the ‘democratic road to socialism’ aspires to build collective power and tip

the balance of class forces from the capitalist class to the working class, culminating in the

collective democratic socialist rule of the state.

As this brief sketch indicates, democratic socialist state theory and the revolutionary

crisis theory of the state are antithetical to one another. The revolutionary economic criticism of

the state’s inability to counteract capitalism’s secular crisis is opposed to a political theory of

using the state to overcome the conjunctural crisis of neoliberalism and build democratic

socialism. Hence a theory of the immediate revolutionary self-abolition of the proletariat and the

communisation of society is opposed by a theory of building class power and the long march

through institutions.

Both of these approaches certainly have merit. Many of the thinkers who have developed

these ideas have also made the foremost contributions to the Marx revival.2 Yet their shared

purpose for theorizing the state—emancipatory strategy in a time of crisis—means that both of

these theories are unsatisfying when it comes to critically understanding the role the state plays

in the reproduction of capitalist society. For despite their antithetical precepts, these two

prevalent approaches to state theory are both premised on an approach to the state from the

perspective of an emancipatory dynamic coupled with an unexamined theory of needs that

abstracts the state from the reproduction of capitalist society.

For the revolutionary crisis theory of the state, the secular economic crisis not only serves

as the basis of its criticisms of the inability of the state to counteract the crisis. The historical

2
Some have also made later contributions to state theory that have been overlooked and do much to redress the
holes in their earlier work. See for example Clover and Bernes 2014, Benanav and Clegg 2018. Since this
contribution is concerned more with criticizing what I take to the prevalent revolutionary crisis theory of the state
within the Marx revival that have drawn on the particular aforementioned works by these thinkers cited above, I do
not address their later overlooked work here.

6
trajectory of the secular crisis also increasingly displaces labourers from the wage relation,

leading to the necessity of revolutionary uprisings that communize reproduction for people to

meet their material needs. Conversely, in the democratic socialist state theory’s conception of the

democratic road to socialism, the shifting balance of class forces will use the state to implement

redistributive programs that will minimize exploitation and build public power. This will meet

people’s needs, strengthening the political will of the masses for socialism, which will be

realized in a progressive historical trajectory that further shifts the balance of class forces, public

power, and redistribution. Such a conjunctural historical trajectory will be realized in democratic

socialism.

Consequently, neither of these approaches to state theory in the Marx revival considers

how the economy, the state, classes, or needs are created by the historically specific form of

capitalist society or how the state’s expansive powers are an integral moment in the reproduction

of this historically specific form of society. Therefore, in what follows, I bring heterodox marxist

critical theory and the critique of the state into the Marx revival by developing a negative-

dialectical critique of the state that grasps the state as a moment in the perpetuation of the

negative totality of capitalist society. In so doing, I draw out the aforementioned shortcomings of

the revolutionary crisis and democratic socialist theories of the state, while gesturing towards a

negative dialectical notion of emancipation.

I do so by first outlining the critiques of crisis, the state, and society developed by

Horkheimer and Adorno and the New Readings of the critique of political economy as a critical

social theory. I then develop a negative-dialectical critique of the state that draws together and

builds on these works in critical theory to critique the state as a moment in the perpetuation of

capitalist society as a negative totality. On this basis, by way of conclusion, I contrast the

7
negative dialectical critique of the state as a moment in the reproduction of the negative totality

of capitalist society with the revolutionary crisis and democratic socialist theories of the state, in

order to indicate their respective shortcomings and point towards a negative-dialectical notion of

emancipation.

II

Karl Marx’s work is full of ambiguities and inconsistencies. The revolutionary and reformist

currents of classical Marxism crystallised around two inconsistencies. The ambivalences of the

first volume of Capital were integral to the revolutionary current of classical Marxist collapse

theory. Their logico-historical reading of Volume 1 held that Marx had deciphered the laws of

historical development, from prehistory (in Chapter 1) to the inevitable collapse of capitalism

and the revolutionary seizure of the means of production in Chapter 32 (see O’Kane 2022). The

reformist current of classical Marxism rejected Marx’s secular crisis theory and drew on other

writings by Marx and Engels to argue that socialism should be built by workers’ parties being

elected into government and passing legislation to build socialism.

In distinguishing themselves from both of these strands of classical, pre-World War I

Marxism, Horkheimer and Adorno developed a heterodox Marxist critical theory of society. In

distinction to the collapse theory of crisis and the social democratic theory of the state,

Horkheimer and Adorno’s critical theory drew on and expanded Marx’s account of the social

constitution and reproduction of the capitalist mode of production into an account of the social

constitution and reproduction of capitalist society.

Following from an interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy as a critical

social theory, Horkheimer’s critical theory of society ‘held on to the realization that the free

8
development of individuals depends on the rational constitution of society. In radically analysing

present social conditions it became a critique of the economy’ (Horkheimer 2002, 243).

Moreover, in contrast to classical Marxism, Horkheimer held that ‘economism, to which the

critical theory is often reduced, does not consist in giving too much importance to the economy,

but in giving it too narrow a scope’ (Horkheimer 2002, 249). The critical theory of society

developed by Horkheimer thus focused on how the antagonistic organisation of capitalist society

was realized in the ‘reified authority’ of capital accumulation, which as a social process,

comprised the economy, state, and family. Hence, in contrast to social democracy’s theory of the

state as the means of emancipation, for Horkheimer the state was an object of critical theory.

Moreover, in contrast to collapse theory, while crises issued from the antagonistic organization

of capitalist society, they were realized in the persistence of suffering and the emergence of new

types of barbarism. (see O’Kane 2021b).

Adorno’s later writings developed a negative-dialectical critique of the negative totality

of capitalist society. In Adorno’s account of late capitalism, the secular crisis of capitalism had

been counteracted by the development of the productive forces, the state management of the

economy, and people’s productive and psychic reliance on capitalist society. Capitalist society

was thus a negative totality comprising these objective and subjective moments. Adorno’s

negative dialectic illuminated how these objective and subjective dimensions of negative totality

relied on each other to break ‘the spell’ of identification and awaken a global subject that would

negate negative totality (see O’Kane 2018; 2022).

The new readings of the critique of political economy as a critical social theory further

developed Horkheimer and Adorno’s criticisms of classical Marxism into critiques of traditional

Marxism. The new readings also developed components of their critical theory of society. Hans-

9
Georg Backhaus (1997) and Helmut Reichelt (1972) criticized the logico-historical and neo-

Ricardian interpretations of Capital first developed by classical Marxism. Their interpretations of

Marx attempted to ground Adorno’s notion of exchange on Marx’s monetary theory of value.

Backhaus and Reichelt also conceived of Marx’s critique of political economy as a negative-

dialectical social theory: The sensible organization of capitalism necessarily appears in the

supersensible form of value, which as a type of social rationality, compels the dynamic of

accumulation and reproduction (See Bellofiore and Redolfi Riva 2015; 2018).

Moishe Postone (1993) distinguished between traditional Marxism and his interpretation

of the critique of political economy as a critique of the historically specific form of private and

social, and concrete and abstract, labour. According to Postone, traditional Marxism’s criticism

of capitalism from the standpoint of labour amounts to a criticism of capitalism as a mode of

distribution. Classical Marxism, in all of its currents, proposed a type of socialism that would

perpetuate the capitalist organization of labour at the behest of the state. Postone’s interpretation

of Marx grasped the concrete and abstract, private and social, aspects of labour as historically

specific and self-mediating (See O’Kane 2018).

Open Marxism, particularly the work of Simon Clarke and Werner Bonefeld, criticized

the modern adherents of both the revolutionary and social democratic theory of the state. Clarke

(1999) and Bonefeld (1999) criticized Brenner’s account of the long downturn for neglecting the

social form of capitalism. Clarke (1994) likewise criticized the adherents of Marx’s secular

theory of crisis for neglecting relative surplus value and argued that Marx’s theory of crisis

amounted to a theory of the crisis-ridden development of capitalism. Clarke (1991) and Bonefeld

(1993) also criticized Poulantzas, Hirsch, and Jessop’s state theories for their reliance on

structural functionalism and bourgeois sociology. Moreover, Clarke and Bonefeld criticized the

10
widespread practice of conjunctural analysis for focusing on epiphenomenal changes that did not

grasp the persistence of the capitalist organization of production and distribution (see Clarke

1991; Bonefeld and Holloway 1991). Finally, Clarke (1988) and Bonefeld (1991) developed

their own critiques of the state as essential to the perpetuation of the capitalist social form and

permanent class struggle. (See Memos 2018)

As can be seen, this tradition of heterodox Marxist critical theory developed criticisms of

crisis theory and social democracy, the state, and capitalist society that have been missing from

the Marx revival.3 In what follows, I draw them together and expand upon them to develop a

negative-dialectical critique of the state as an essential moment in the reproduction of the

negative totality of capitalist society.

III.

In contrast to both the revolutionary crisis and democratic socialist theories of the state, the

negative-dialectical critical social theory of the state is not premised on the longrun secular crisis

of capitalist profits, nor the balance of class forces. Nor is it premised on the predominance of

the economy over the state or the state over the economy. Finally, it is not premised on an

emancipatory strategy that follows from these premises. Rather, the negative-dialectical critique

of the state is grounded on the persistence of suffering and misery incurred by the organization

and perpetuation of capitalist society in all its linked dimensions.4

3
Why this perspective has been missing is not clear or straightforward. Given the context in which the current Marx
revival has occurred, the criticisms of crisis theory and periodisation developed by this Marxian critical theoretical
approach may have been untimely. The preoccupation of what passes for contemporary Frankfurt School critical
theory with justice and discourse ethics may have also contributed to this perspective being overlooked.
4
Such an approach has certainly been interpreted as moralist and humanist, or criticized for its incomplete
normative standpoint. However, the crucial difference between such a conception of critical theory and moral or
humanist criticisms of capitalism has to do with the fact that suffering and misery are not premised on human

11
 Such a notion of capitalist society is grounded on Marx’s insight that that the capitalist

production process ‘proceed[s] from specific economic and historical relations of production,

that produces and reproduces these relations of production themselves, and with them the bearers

of this process, their material conditions of existence, and their mutual relationships, i.e. the

specific economic form of their society’ (Marx 1981, 957). For ‘the totality of these relationships

which the bearers of this production have towards nature and one another, the relationships in

which they produce, is precisely society, viewed according to its economic structure’ (Marx

1981, 957). Those conditions, like these social relations, are on the one hand the presuppositions

of the capitalist production process, on the other its results ‘and creations; they are both produced

by it and reproduced by it’ (Marx, 1981, 957). Consequently,

every pre-condition of the social reproduction process is at the same time its result, and every

one of its results appears simultaneously as its pre-condition. All the production relations within

which the process moves are therefore just as much its product as they are its conditions. The

more one examines its nature as it really is, [the more one sees] that …in the capitalist process,

every element .. is already an inversion and causes relations between people to appear as the

attributes of things and as relations of people to the social attribute of things’ (Marx, 1972 507-

8).

In the negative-dialectical critique of the state, accumulation and reproduction do not

consist in production for need which is misallocated by the capitalist mode of exploitation and

distribution, due to the rising organic composition of capital or the balance of class forces.

essence or abstract notions of the good, but instead pertain to the socially-mediated experiences of suffering and
misery incurred by the organization of capitalist society.

12
Instead, the negative-dialectical critique of the state draws on the aspects of Marx’s critique of

political economy that demonstrate how domination, class antagonism, and misery are inherent

to the historically specific social organization of the capitalist mode of production. Along these

lines Marx states that ‘the mode of production produces, both objectively and subjectively, not

only the object consumed but also the manner of its consumption’ (Marx 1973, 92). Production,

needs, the balance of class forces, accumulation, and reproduction are thus all indelibly shaped

by the organization of capitalist society as a historically specific type of all-around dependency,

in which ‘the social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share

of individuals in production appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals,

not as their relation to one another, but as their subordination to relations which subsists

independently of them and which arise out of collisions between mutually indifferent

individuals’. Consequently, individuals are now ruled by ‘abstractions which are nothing more

than the theoretical expression of those material relations which are their lord and master’ (Marx

1973, 166).

On this basis, following Horkheimer and Adorno, the negative totality of capitalist

society is conceived of as

a sort of linking structure between human beings in which everything and everyone
depend on everyone and everything; the whole is only sustained by the unity of the
functions fulfilled by all its members, and each single one of these members is in
principle assigned such a function, while at the same time each individual is determined
to a great degree by his membership in this total structure
Institute for Social Research 1972, 16).

Consequently,

. . . Sociology becomes a critique of society as soon as it does not merely describe and
weigh institutions and processes of society, but confronts them with what underlies
these, with the life of those upon whom these institutions have been imposed, and those

13
 of whom the institutions themselves are to such a great extent composed ( Institute for
Social Research 1972, 23).

Backhaus’s contribution to the development of the critique of political economy as a

critical social theory provides a way of uniting Marx’s notion of value and Adorno’s negative

totality. As Backhaus writes, ‘[v]alue for Marx is thus not an unmoving substance in

undifferentiated rigidity but something which unfolds itself in differentiations . . . It is self-

evident that the doubling of the commodity into commodity and money is first deciphered when

it can be shown that this antagonistic relation between things expresses a relation between people

which is similarly structured in an antagonistic way’ (1980, 112). Conversely, these ‘social

relations of people’ must be so defined that from their structure the antagonistic ‘relation of

things’ becomes comprehensible (Backhaus 1980, 112).

The negative-dialectical critique of the state that I will now outline proceeds from these

theoretical bases by contextualizing the state in the reproduction of the negative totality of

capitalist society. Such a negative totality is constituted by historically-specific and antagonistic

social relations that result in the moments of the negative totality of capitalist society: the

economy, the state, and the household. Each of these moments socializes and compels

individuals to act in certain ways that reinforce the other spheres and reproduce capitalist society,

resulting in the persistence of suffering and misery. On this basis, the negative-dialectical

critique of the state proceeds by identifying how the state contributes to the reproduction of these

other spheres, which taken together ultimately perpetuate the constitutive premises of capitalist

society.

Drawing on and extending Bonefeld (2014), the constitutive premises of capitalist society

were created by primitive accumulation. In that process, the state separated people from their

14
means of reproduction and expropriated land and wealth for the ruling classes. This created the

capital relation and the historically-specific forms of property, labour, and wealth. A class of

workers who were ‘doubly free’ were compelled to compete with each other to sell their labour

power in exchange for wages to a class of capitalists who were compelled to purchase their

labour power to compete with each other to valorize value. Private households emerged as the

domain of domestic labour which sustained the sellers of labour power. The state transformed

into the capitalist state, an entity which sustained these moments and such a society. Hence, these

constitutive premises appear in the result: the negative totality of capitalist society. Moreover, as

I now indicate, each of these spheres compels individuals to act in certain ways that reinforce the

other spheres and reproduce capitalist society, and thus its constitutive premises of separation.5

In contrast to traditional Marxism, the capitalist economy is not criticised on the basis of

how the distribution of the proceeds of labour do not meet the needs of labourers. Rather,

following Postone, such a critical theory demonstrates how the historically specific social form

of labour creates the abstractions of value that compel individuals to organize labour in a way

that perpetuates capitalist society. Following Backhaus and Reichelt, the categories of political

economy are not just forms of thought but real abstractions that grasp the necessary appearance

of such a historically-specific antagonistic social reality. Although a fully-fledged recapitulation

of these categories exceeds the confines of this chapter (see Hunter in this collection), they

consist in the historically specific dual character of labour, the forms of value and their

subsidiaries, which mediate the process of production, accumulation and reproduction via the

‘personification of things and the reification of persons’ Marx, 1976, 209).

5
As this implies, my extension of Bonefeld’s reading of primitive accumulation differs from other contemporary
readings developed by Wood (1999) and Harvey (2004) by grasping primitive accumulation as a historical and
ongoing process that is the premise and the result of capital accumulation and reproduction.

15
 From this it follows that capitalists are ‘personifications of economic categories’ (Marx,

1976, 92) compelled by the historically specific natural laws of accumulation to compete to

acquire profit in the form of money. As ‘character masks’, workers are compelled by the ‘silent

compulsion of economic relations’ (Marx 1976, 899) to compete with each other to sell their

labour power as a commodity in exchange for a wage determined by the labour market in order

to survive. Capitalists purchase the commodity labour power on the labour market because it is a

peculiar commodity that can produce more value than it costs. Since profit is dependent upon

selling commodities on the market while maximizing surplus value, capitalists are compelled to

maximize working hours, to reduce wages, and to increase productivity. This leads to the

revolutionising of production via supervision, and an increasing division of labour and reliance

on machinery, resulting in the deskilling, maiming, displacement, and fragmentation of workers.

This dynamic is replicated across the social division of labour as a whole. The accumulation of

capital is therefore not the production of an expanding basket of goods that would serve as the

basis of socialism if it was not pilfered by capitalists; nor is it an inevitable process in which

wage labour is replaced by the rising organic composition of capital. Rather, the ‘productive’

worker is an ‘appendage of a machine’ and a ‘fragment of a human’ Marx 1976, 799) who cares

as ‘much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him,

and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk’ (Marx 1973, 273). Moreover, the result of this

form of production is a blind, crisis-ridden process of ‘accumulation of wealth at one pole’ and

the accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral

degradation at the opposite pole’ (Marx 1976, 799), through the ‘multiplication of the proletariat’

(Marx 1976, 764) and the reproduction of separation on an ‘extending scale’ (See O’Kane,

forthcoming).

16
 The household is not a private sphere separate from the economy or state, nor is domestic

labour separate from productive labour. Rather, ‘[p]rivate life, the zone of individuality’ is

‘absorbed by so-called social activities and thus likewise moulded by . . . the schemata of

society’ (Adorno 2019, 64). The existence of the household is predicated on private property and

the state. Possessing a household also requires wages and/or state revenue. Reproducing a

household consists in domestic labour performed in accordance with these imperatives. The

household is thus inherent to private property, atomization, and competition. Domestic labourers,

moreover, are sustainers of private households and the commodity of labour power, and

domestic labour is rationalized in response to different types of revenue (see Munro 2019). In

this martyrology of reproductive labour, the stultifying and maiming activities of domestic

labour sustain individuals as bearers of the commodity of labour power. In so doing, the

household and domestic labour also sustain private property, competition, exploitation, and the

dehumanization of subjectivity, contributing to the reproduction of the negative totality of

capitalist society (see O’Kane and Munro 2022).

The negative-dialectical critique of the state focuses on how the state mediates and

reinforces the economy and household. Such an approach critiques the form of the state as an

supra-individual, autonomous entity that is separate from but related to the economy and

household. On this basis the negative-dialectical critique of the state illuminates how the form of

the capitalist state and its administrative capacities perpetuate the negative totality of capitalist

society. Contra both the revolutionary crisis and democratic socialist theories of the state, the

state is not an institution that stands outside the economy and the household that is then rendered

ineffectual by the secular dynamic of accumulation. Nor is the state a ‘contradictory terrain’

whose institutions might be used to build workers’ power on the road to socialism. Rather,

17
expanding on Bonefeld, the state is the ‘political form’ of capitalist society: an essential moment

in the negative totality of capitalist society that reinforces and facilitates the reproduction of the

negative totality of capitalist society via its specific form, which is separate from and reinforces

the economy and household.

The capitalist state’s form and attendant form of law and constitution formalize and

reinforce the separation of producers from the means of production, the possession of wealth and

the means of production, in the codification and enforcement of property laws (as mentioned

above, these laws also establish and preserve the private household). The form of law as a real

abstraction treats individuals as equal citizens by abstracting from this historically-specific form

of separation and class antagonism.

This process of abstraction is supplemented in the public sphere and electoral politics

which, as Johannes Agnoli argues, are presupposed by the separation of the economic and

political and codified in a constitution. According to Agnoli, a constitution 'guarantees the

predominance of the capitalist mode of production and, at the same time, satisfies the demand for

mass political participation by the population.’ This is because a constitution establishes a

democratic ‘framework’ that ‘guarantees’ and ‘safeguards’ the capitalistic ‘organization of social

reproduction’ (Agnoli 2000, 201). The constituitive premises of capitalist society are preserved

in electoral political contests that replace class antagonists and anti-capitalist struggles with

juridically equal citizens and ensure that ‘all opportunities, beyond the democratic virtue of

“voting”, of active meddling in politics are excluded from the “liberal democratic” principles of

government’ (Agnoli 2000, 199)

As consequence, anti-capitalist political movements that enter the political sphere are

absorbed and depoliticised by what Agnoli calls the process of ‘statification’. Citizen’s active

18
participation in progressive and democratic socialist social movements that embrace electoralism

are replaced by electoral platforms developed by parties and extolled by elected representatives.

The policies in these party platforms are limited by the form of law and the constitution so that

even if are passed into law, progressive or democratic socialist demands are transformed ‘into

bureaucratic apparatuses of integration’ (Agnoli 2014) (see O’Kane 2021).

Consequently, whether Keynesian or monetarist, redistributive or de-distributive,

reformist or non-reformist reforms, these policies do not empower or disempower, advance, or

set the class struggle back. This is because ‘each parliamentary reform that is realized within

states . . . serves not to expand the possibility for the masses to take part in decision-making

processes, but rather to contain that possibility by intensifying parliament’s function of

domination’ (Agnoli 2014 ). Indeed, whether funded by demand or supply side economics,

progressive taxation or mounting debt, regressive and progressive, social democratic and

democratic socialist reforms aid accumulation and reproduction, which as history has shown, is

compatible with this variety of approaches. Moreover, as history has further shown, the

implementation of these economic and social policies via bureaucratic administration likewise

depoliticizes class struggle, preserving the atomization of individuals while subjecting them to

dominating and coercive bureaucratic rationality that undermines autonomy. These economic

and social policies also contribute to the sustenance of the economy and households (see Clarke

1988; Bonefeld 2014; Munro 2021; O’Kane and Munro 2022).

Such a process of bureaucratic depoliticization and atomisation is mirrored in the

predominant approach to public and private education, which Adorno aptly described as ‘house

training’. The purpose of this approach to education is not to develop autonomous individuals

who can grasp the suffering society inflicts upon them and act collectively to emancipatorily

19
negate society. Rather, education trains and disciplines people into using their skills and

competing with their peers to sell, reproduce, or purchase labor power in order to survive.

Finally, there is policing. As Mark Neocleous notes, not only do policing and legislation

possess the same etymology, but the activity of law enforcement as law-making violence unveils

the violent truth of the state’s purpose (2000). The electoral sphere of the state reproduces

capitalist society by depoliticizing class struggle and the organization of capitalist society. The

policy arms of the state reproduce capitalist society through the violence of administration,

depoliticization, and the sustenance of the economy and household. Policing reproduces

capitalist society through the mechanisms of law enforcement as counterinsurgency;

criminalizing acts that attempt to undermine the organization of capitalist society, and

demonizing, brutalizing and incarcerating those who perform these acts.

The objective aspects of these moments of the negative totality of capitalist society are

mirrored in the constitution of subjectivity and needs. People’s subjectivities and needs are

shaped by the economy, the household, and the state, which as a whole, compels people to act in

the myriad of aforementioned antagonistic ways that reproduce capitalist society. This process of

socialization maims people’s ability to think critically and act autonomously; the objective

reliance of people upon the negative totality of capitalist society is mirrored in a tendency to

become subjectively reliant upon it. Hence, as Horkheimer indicates, ‘There is not only the general,

systematically engineered brainwashing but the threat of economic ruin, social ostracism, the

penitentiary and death to deter reason from attacking the key conceptual techniques of domination’

(Horkheimer, 1978, 17).

The negative dialectical critique of the state does not then merely take aim at the

institution of the state by virtue of its inability to counteract economic crises, nor does it

conceive of the state as an ‘arena’ or a ‘terrain’ of class struggle. Rather, the negative-dialectical

20
critique of the state critiques the form and capacities of the capitalist state by virtue of its place in

the negative totality of capitalist society, and illuminates how the form and capacities of the

capitalist state mediates the economy and household as a moment in the ‘negative unity of

society in its overall unfreedom’ (Adorno 2019, 70). Such a negative-dialectical critique further

demonstrates how the state form and its capacities are inherent to the negative totality of

capitalist society and its objective subject process of reproduction via its reliance on and

reinforcement of the economy and household. All three are the results of the constitutive premise

of separation inherent to capitalist society that is perpetuated by its reproduction, culminating in

the persistence of unfreedom, misery, and suffering.

Conclusion

The contemporary revival of Marxist theory has led to the development of two

predominant approaches to state theory. The crisis theory of the state focuses on criticizing the

state’s inability to counteract the unfolding secular crisis of capitalism. The democratic socialist

theory of the state conceives of the state as an object of socialist strategy. On this basis, the crisis

theory of the state criticizes reformism as an impossibility and advocates for revolutionary

immediacy, while democratic socialist state theory advocates non-reformist reforms as part of

the process of building class power on the revolutionary road to socialism. Despite their merits,

these mutually antithetical approaches offer foreshortened notions of the role of the state in the

reproduction of capitalist society.

This chapter has attempted to clarify these shortcomings by developing a negative

dialectical critique of the form and capacities and role of the state in the reproduction of capitalist

society as a negative totality. In contrast to the revolutionary crisis and democratic socialist

21
theories, according to the negative-dialectical critical social theory of the state, it is not a

question of conceiving of what role the state plays in relation to the economy, nor of secular

crisis, nor the balance of class forces. Rather it is a question of conceiving of the economy, class,

and the state as moments in the reproduction of the historically-specific negative totality of

capitalist society in order to demonstrate the ‘negative unity of society in its overall unfreedom’

(Adorno 2019, 70) and the suffering and misery that results from this historically-specific,

antagonistic organisation of society.

Consequently, contra the revolutionary crisis theory of the state, the negative-dialectical

critique of the state does not underestimate the state on the basis of the reified dynamic of secular

crisis; nor does it assume that once people’s needs are not being met, they will rise up. Instead

the negative-dialectical critique of the state holds that even if there is a secular crisis that cannot

be counteracted by state’s fiscal and monetary policy, leading to spontaneous revolutionary

uprisings, that such a revolutionary crisis theory passes over the other elements of the state and

subjectivity—notably policing, law, the military, and education—integral to reproducing the

historically-specific social form of capitalist society. At the same time, in distinction to the

democratic socialist theory of the state, even if the conjunctural analyses of democratic socialist

state theory were to prove right and a wave of elections resulted in a shift of the balance of class

forces in the terrain of the state and redistributive policies, the negative dialectical social critique

of the state holds that democratic socialist state theory does not address the form of state, nor its

role in depoliticization. Following Agnoli, the negative-dialectical critique of the state holds that

‘state institutions do not allow themselves to be used in any manner whatsoever, for their logic is

not their own, but is determined by the reality whose functioning they serve. State institutions are

not there to realize either freedom or human rights, not to mention social emancipation; rather

22
they have solely the responsibility of organizing and securing the social reproduction of a

capitalist society’ (Agnoli 2014, 190). Consequently, following Clarke, redistributive state

policies do not then build either public power or the political will for class struggle; instead, they

create bureaucratic agencies that undermine workers’ autonomy and depoliticise class struggle.

Hence following and adapting Horkheimer ‘Numerous unsavory activities are required if society

is to be held together, including the maintenance of prisons and the production of murderous

weapons’ (Horkheimer, Critique of Instrumental Reason). Moreover, as Horkheimer further

notes ‘The way the police occasionally treat the workers during an uprising or beat the

imprisoned unemployed with the butts of their rifles, the tone the factory porter uses with the

man looking for work, the workhouse and the penitentiary, all these function as the limits that

disclose the space in which we live’ (Horkheimer 1978, 76).

Socialist strategies and theories of emancipation should not then rest on theories of crisis

or the state that divorce crises and the state from the reproduction of capitalist society. Rather,

emancipatory movements must grasp crises and the state, class, and needs as integral to the

historically-specific organization of capitalist society, and conceive of the perpetuation of that

society, in any guise, as permanent catastrophe perpetuating suffering, misery, and domination.

Hence the negative-dialectical critique of the state amounts to a critique of the perpetuation of

capitalist society as permanent class struggle and a notion of revolutionary negativity that

abolishes its historically-specific form.

This approach to emancipatory politics will no doubt be unsatisfactory to those who want

to identify the new subjects or agents of transformation, or to those who believe a program will

be developed that will create them. Yet developing such a negative-dialectical critique of the

state, as outlined here, aims to break the spell of state theory and of the identification of

23
emancipatory politics with the secular crisis or the state, illuminating how the historically-

specific premises and the objective and subjective domains of capitalist society reinforce each

other, perpetuating domination, pain and misery, in order to develop the critical insight and

desire to overcome them. Such an negative emancipatory approach is already mirrored in

constellations of movements and moments that reject the reified authority of capitalist society

and move to immediately negate the negative totality of capitalist society by overcoming the

historically-specific forms of separation, antagonism, and domination it is premised on. This

chapter hopes to accompany these movements by intervening in the Marx revival to raise these

urgent questions and contribute to the awakening of a global subject that abolishes the

historically-specific negative totality of capitalist society.

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