The movements from Tahrir to Liberty Square have in different ways posed the question of space and political authority.

  But perhaps there has been a bias toward approaching this question mainly on the level of international or transnational action, whether it be in the form of ‘globalization’ or imperialism.  Somehow, and I know this bothers you as much as it does me, New Labour’s Regional Spatial Strategies were just not as interesting as the Bush administration’s ‘Green Zone’ strategy in Iraq.  

  It is natural enough that the ‘spatial turn’ of social theory was linked particularly to the question of imperialism in the last decade.  This is not only because the US army corps of engineers could be found building Xanadu compounds, permanent military bases and separation walls in Iraq, which just is an inherently interesting type of spatial activity.  It is because when a state projects political authority outside of its sovereign, bounded territory, and begins the task of organising the political space of another nation, the seeming naturalness and obviousness of the relationship between space and political power is necessarily problematized.  Territorial authority looks very clearly like what it is: an artifice, a production, multi-tiered effort of coercion, culture war, political organization, economic strategy, material incentives, symbolic organization, the construction, reconstruction and moving of internal frontiers, and so on.  Suddenly, the means by which we ourselves are dominated become visible.  Suddenly we get to see how it is all constructed: it isn’t called ‘state-building’ for nothing.  We can learn a lot from the cities defiled by empire, as Derek Gregory has shown us.  

  And, to be fair, things aren’t quite as one-sided as I am painting them.  It is true that the organization of cities, metropolitan boroughs, counties, and regions, was much more of a going concern during the ‘urbanisation’ boom of the Sixties and Seventies.  Henri Lefebvre and his student Manuel Castells were took the lead as social theorists throwing into question the embedded assumptions of Chicago School ‘urban theory’, partially in response to the jacqueries of 1968, and the French state’s urban rationalisation project.  Each understood in different ways – Lefebvre as a marxist-humanist, Castells as an althusserian - that the ideology of ‘urbanism’ was symptomatic, coming just as the urban-rural divide was really dying, the city in its old form as a sort of isolated hive of commerce and culture finished.  This ideology adverted to certain real long-term trends, intimately connected with the state and its functions in allocating production facilities, and ensuring the conditions for collective consumption (of housing, health, education, municipal lighting, rubbish collection, etc.) in its extended sense allowing the reproduction of labour power.  But the explanation of these issues was obscured by the deployment of an object, the ‘urban’, which lacked rigorous definition.  They understood the ‘urban’ to refer to a set of social predicaments, political antagonisms, and so on, among and between definitely social classes and interests, which required a more sophisticated socio-spatial analysis to cope with scalar reorganization that was global and affected not just the metropolitan area, but also the status of national states as the strategic basis for production.  This type of analysis, sometimes leavened by poststructuralist additives, has been sustained through the years by the likes of Neil Brenner, David Harvey, Ira Katznelson and Mike Davis.  Arguably, such work has become more important in recent years.  For example, Harvey’s Right to the City, though simply following up on his long-term research agenda, seems very Zeitgeisty in the wake of Occupy.

  Still, there’s a logic to focusing on the axis of imperialism, since the emphasis on interstate relations and antagonisms forces one to consider the national territory not as a spatial given but as a social relationship.  What I want to do in this, another of my exceptionally long, finger-wagging, listen-up-and-do-as-you’re-told posts, is try to explain something about the capitalist state and its spatial logics.  I start at the inter-state level, by traversing some of the issues thrown up by imperialism, and then drill down to national states and their ordering of space.  Let me start with the ‘new imperialism’.

***

  Theories positing a 'new imperialism' pivot on the intersection of two logics of power, conceptually separate though inextricable in practise. According to David Harvey and Giovanni Arrighi, these logics are: the capitalist logic and the territorial logic. (I’m aware that Alex Callinicos also aligns with this tendency, but I see his dichotomy as being slightly different, focused on the relative autonomy of the geopolitical from the economic logic). Harvey assigns a distinct type of spatial organisation to each of these logics of power. Thus, the territorial logic is that of states, whose power is based in command of a determinate territory and "the capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources". The capitalist logic of power produces capillary flows of capital accumulation which flow "across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities". 

  Lefebvre looms large in much of this thinking, especially for Harvey.  For Lefebvre, the relationship between the state and space has to be constituted along several axes.  First, there is the production of a national space itself, a national territory that bears the marks of human generations, classes, political forces, etc.  Of course, the capitalist state by no means coincides with the nation – but as we will see, this is beside the point.  Capitalist states organise territory as national space.  Second, the state constitutes within the territory a matrix of institutional spaces appropriate for a social division of labour, and the imperatives of political dominance.  Each of these spaces, from the borough to the post office to the police station, condenses a system of social expectations and responses, which become so 'natural' and 'obvious' that they are never articulated.  Third, the state composes a 'mental' or imaginary space, a set of representations through which people live their relationship to the people-nation, the state and the territory.

  According to Lefebvre, the spatiality of the state constantly comes into conflict with "the pre-existent economic space that it encounters", "spontaneous poles of growth, historic towns, commercialized fragments of space that are sold in 'lots'":

  I dare say the concept of the 'state mode of production' is theoretically extravagant, stretching the concept of the mode of production beyond breaking point, but the thrust of this is clear: there are two spatial logics of power, one spontaneous, random, commercial and capitalist, coming 'from below'; the other planned, ordered, rationalised, non-capitalist, coming 'from above'.

  Equally, some of the inspiration for this distinction may have to do with the work of the geographer G William Skinner, who certainly influenced Arrighi, and the sociologist Charles Tilly, who extrapolated from Skinner's conclusions.  In an important book, Coercion, Capital and European States 900 - 1900, Tilly wrote:

  Again, it seems that the spatial logic of capital is identical with the spatial logic of commerce, a spontaneous system of flows, coming from below, 'bottom-up'; while the spatial logic of the state is rationalising, ordering, coercive, 'top-down'.  Two spatial logics, two types of power, each so distinct that, for Lefebvre at least, the state's type of power even rises to the level of being a mode of production.  

  This has, superficially at least, a topographical similarity to the Deleuze and Guattari couplet, territorialization-deterritorialization.  You have on the one hand the oedipalized territorialities such as the nation, the church, the family etc., imposing themselves hierarchically, top-down.  These are dominant in the feudal era.  And on the other, the "deterritorialized" flows of capital, obeying a logic much like that of free-flowing desire, destroying the Oedipal territorialities.  The capitalist logic arises from the intersection of two developments, two decoded flows - those of labour, in the form of the free worker, and those of production in the form of money-capital.  And so these twin logics of territorializing political authority and deterritorializing capital, though carnally enmeshed*, tug at and militate against one another.  This is a common image in social theory.

***

  My reservation about 'new imperialism' theory was at first an inchoate and very slightly philistine feeling that I simply didn't 'get' the seemingly exaggerated emphasis on space.  Bob Jessop pointed out a decade ago that the turn toward 'globalization' as the master-concept of social theory produced a pronounced 'spatial' turn that was long overdue for reconsideration if not revision.  More specifically, I didn't get the emphasis on the territorial as a drive logically distinct from capitalist power.  It seemed to me that territorial space was just one aspect or moment in the development of concrete social formations in which the mode of production took root, just one of the aspects that the mode of production organised.  Could it really constitute a logic of power distinct from, but equivalent to, capitalist power?

  Robert Brenner's critique of Harvey's 'new imperialism' theory zones in on this problem.  The capitalist logic of power, says Brenner, is clear.  There are a set of imperatives (production for profit, reducing costs, etc.), and a set of  mechanisms (intra-capitalist competition, pricing, etc.) by which those imperatives are enforced.  Moreover, there is a strong empirical basis for its existence.  But the territorial logic of power, the state logic, is not at all clear.  There appears to be only a vague set of determinations behind this logic, no obvious imperatives or raison d'etre driving it, and little in the way of an empirical basis.  Insofar as the state planners have an interest in defending a territory, expanding their extra-territorial dominion, etc., it is not clear that this is distinct from capitalist interests.  In explaining this, Brenner sticks closely to a 'homeostatic' model of the capitalist state.  The state’s functioning and wealth being derived from capitalist growth, its managers will tend to act in accord with capitalist imperatives.  And he suggests that, independently of his conceptual framework, that is actually Harvey's approach in his explanations of concrete imperialist actions.

  Despite my misgivings about the 'new imperialism' theories, I can't assent unreservedly to this critique.  Though Brenner pinpoints what I see as a real problem with the 'new imperialism' theories, his critique is bound up with a set of assumptions I don't share.  Brenner argues that there is 'rational core' to Harvey's theory in that it seeks to explain the apparent disjuncture between what might be in the interests of the capitalist class, and the actions undertaken by the state (wars, etc.).  In place of ‘two logics’, Brenner fulcrums his explanation for this gap on the dysfunctional relationship between a state form (the national state) and capitalist imperatives (which continually transgress national boundaries).  For Brenner, the world system being compose of many sovereign states is an historical fact which emerged in the context of feudalism, not capitalism; its survival is not essential to capitalism.  Capitalism transformed extant territorial states into capitalist states without actually altering the multi-state character of the world system.  This argument is given considerable historical depth and detail in Benno Teschke's The Myth of 1648  A world-state, Brenner argues, would be far more functional for capitalist growth than the national state, since as capital internationalizes, national states cannot implement strategies to resolve international deadlocks in production or make adjustments to overcome global imbalances, with the necessary degree of coordination.  The problem here is that while this might explain the general tendency toward irrational conflict between states, and their failure to coordinate rational policy responses to capitalist crisis, this doesn't actually explain why a capitalist state under a particular management might pursue policies that are seemingly at odds with any attempt at a national level to overcome such imbalances, resolve crises of production and so on.

  I think it would be better to start answering that question with the fact just as there are many states, that there is no single or general capitalist interest, but rather many capitals, nationally constituted and constitutively divided into fractions with a hierarchy of power between them.  The hegemonic fraction is that which leads the others, and dominates the state at any given moment.  And even then, there is no absolute agreement on interests or strategy within a given fraction - hedge funds, for example, may differ from investment banks as to the best way to raid social security.  The more determinations you add, the more complex the divisions become, and their resolution is contingent on political and ideological leadership.  Rather than assuming a homeostatic model of state action, according to which capitalist interests exert a long-range regulatory effect on state power, this approach places the issue firmly back on the terrain of political praxis, with all its implied dysfunctions.  And, in fact, Brenner's explanation for the causes of the Iraq war points to this Gramscian problematic.

  I have other issues.  I think the account of why capitalist states are determined by capitalist and not territorial logic, implies an inadequate mechanistic model of causality.  This is a criticism that applies to other political marxists such as Teschke and Lacher, and also in my opinion to theorists such as Fred Block who also deploy a homeostatic model of the state-capital relationship.  Intriguingly,  the same conclusion regarding the contingent nature of the state system has been reached by those deploying an expressive model of causality.  The critical theoretical impulse of the state-derivation school, beginning in West Germany but taking off in the Anglophone left through the work of John Holloway, Werner Bonefeld and others, was to treat the state as a fetishised form of the capital-relation. Influenced by Evgeny Pashukanis, they thought that just as he derived the legal form from the commodity form, so they could homologously derive the state form from the capital form. This being so, the most important thing about the state form was the way in which it condensed at a general level the capital-relation, becoming in a sense the ideal capitalist, in order to remedy the deficiencies and dysfunctions in the circuits of production and exchange.  The capitalist mode of production being world-wide in scale, there was no necessary reason why the states system should take the form of national states. Thus, Claudia von Braunmühl’s essay on the nation-state in Holloway and Picciotto’s seminal State and Capital argues that this pre-structuration of the state system by feudal relations has been imposed on capitalism.  Capitalism’s systemic opportunism allowed it to take hold of the international states system and transform it, but otherwise it is not essential to the system.  There are some extremely interesting aspects of this approach, which I’ll come back to, and the state-derivation approach has produced some rich, suggestive analyses.  But, to paraphrase Bernard Shaw, it is in this respect like a library: excellent to borrow from but otherwise to be avoided at all costs.  

  I am not convinced that the existence of many states under the dominance of the capitalist mode of production is merely an historical legacy contingent to capitalism, which could in principle be superseded.   This is not, I insist, to lapse into that tacit functionalism according to which what exists under capitalism must exist for the good of capitalism.  I can well see that sovereign, territorial states pre-dated capitalism and imposed a structuring effect on the emerging capitalist world order.  I simply do not see that capitalism could provide the material basis for anything other than a multi-state system.  And it seems to me that to say the multi-state system is an historical legacy and nothing more is to explain away rather than explain the problem of the relationship between the multiple scalar and spatial levels of political organisation and the capitalist mode of production.  The development of capitalism seems to entail a particular type of territorialisation of political power, and it's worth trying to understand why.  I think neither the mechanistic nor expressive models of causality can serve us well in explaining this, and I will later indicate the relevance of Althusser’s notion of structural causality.

***

  What does the territorialisation of political power consist of?  Territoriality in its simplest sense is the disposal of a particular bounded space as a base for achieving a particular social outcome.  A church, a police station, a school... all are, among other things, bounded spaces within which a certain type of social organisation is performed; containers for certain sets of social relations.  Territorialising political power, then, is nothing other than a process of binding political authority to a determinate space in which the goals of the politically dominant class, the ruling class, can be achieved.  

  What is distinctive about capitalist state territoriality?  We can start with the problem of sovereignty.  In the international system, the modern state is a sovereign power to the extent that it not only exercises a monopoly of legitimate violence and political authority within its bounded territory, but also demands recognition by other states of its exclusive right within that territory. In exchange, it recognises the same exclusive right of other states.  This notion of sovereignty seems to have origins in feudal property relations, in absolutist states organised on the basis of kingship, patrilineal descent and personal rule. The concept of sovereignty described the absolute right of kings and princes to dispose of their population and territory, to instruct them in their faith, and command them as they saw fit. However, sovereignty takes a particular form under capitalism that is quite distinct from that of feudal states: it is the sovereignty of the people-nation rather than the king as god-incarnate. 

  This redirects the discussion from inter-state relations to social relations in general; the capitalist state is not just a territorial state, but a national territorial state.  It is a national space that the modern state organises, maps, and attempts to bring under a grid of intelligibility.  But as I have also said, the state does not strictly coincide with the nation.  Many states, like the UK, are multinational; and many nationalities have no state. Nor, obviously enough, are the state's powers simply contained within the boundaries over which it exercises sovereignty: one effect of the internationalization of capital is the internationalization of capitalist states. Nonetheless, the capitalist state specifically identifies itself as a national state, and cannot be indifferent to nations. In some cases, it suppresses them. In some cases, it organises them in a multinational territory, reproducing national spaces through its distribution and scalar organization of sites of power as part of the logic of political domination, while elaborating a superordinate nationality as part of its symbolic organisation of the territory it rules. So, nationality cannot escape the logic of statehood, and the territory of the state is always national.

  One strategy for explaining the relationship between nation-state and capital is to relate the development of the national state to the requirements of a unified market. As Fernand Braudel put it:

  This would seem at first glance to explain the relationship between the spread of capitalism and the shift from fragmented polities of various scales and types with nebulous boundaries - city-states, principalities, communes, sprawling patchwork empires etc. - to rationalised, imperfectly homogenised national-states.  Capitalism’s need for a unified space within which production and exchange can be organised gives rise to various ways of organising space – the growth of towns and cities connected by transport and communications (in a single dominant language), unified by a common currency, protected by military installations, within a territory delimited by borders and protected by a sovereign authority.  But returning to Braunmühl’s argument, cited above, we are reminded of a methodological principle derived from Lukacs – the primacy of the totality over individual instances.  It is insufficient to take the nation-state itself as the starting point, the self-sufficient unit from whose aggregation a world-system arises: “An international system is not the sum of many states, but on the contrary the international system consists of many nation states. The world market is not constituted by many national economies concentrated together, rather the world market is organized in the form of many national economies as its integral components.”  

  The theoretical basis for this assertion is the typical state-derivationist approach of attempting to derive the state form from something in the general concept of capital.  In this case, it is at first the world market itself that is implied in the general concept of capital, as capital has an innate tendency to drive through and beyond national boundaries.  Through the mediation of the world market, localised centres of production and accumulation form a totality, and from that arises the material basis for a world state to carry out the tasks of an ideal-capitalist.  The fact that there is not one world state but many states is, then, an historical accident; nonetheless, these states have fallen under the dominance of the world capitalist system, have been transformed into political organisations capable of organising the world market in some way, and thus should not be seen as simply a series of nation-states having a relationship of exteriority to one another.  They are intrinsically linked through the world market upon which they arise.  Clearly, then, if the unification of the market is what is at stake, it is difficult to explain the perpetuation of national states except as a contingent fact.

  However, there is no reason to start by inferring or deriving the capitalist state form from commodity circulation.  We can certainly concede the methodological primacy of the totality.  But we should remember that the capitalism which emerges in Marx’s Capital is a complex totality composed of many determinations.  Each new determination, as Callinicos points out in Imperialism and Political Economy, is connected to the previous in a dependent but non-deductive way.  So Marx moves from the analysis of the commodity form to the struggle over the eight hour day, or financial markets, or another aspect of capitalist relations.  And while each stage of analysis may depend on the foregoing explications, it is not directly implied in them.  Capital markets are not implicit in the analysis of the commodity form; there is no reason why the state form should be implied by the general form of capital either.  That being the case, the capitalist state form must be seen as part of a complex totality of mutually articulated elements, each exerting a reciprocal effectivity on the others, the organization of the whole determining the effectivity of each element.  The capitalist state is overdetermined by the organization of the complex totality of which it forms a part.

***

  From this perspective alone can one start to do justice to the relationship between the national state and capitalism. The rational kernel of the state-derivation approach is that capitalism doesn’t merely impose a new organization on territorial entities which otherwise remain essentially the same, but rather take hold of an alter their materiality.  This is true of all the spatial units that occur under capitalism. Castells denounced ‘urban theory’ for presuming that the urban retained the same content, the same meaning, through centuries of change, across modes of production and the stages in their development.  Urban space meant something quite different in medieval Europe; towns and cities represented a different spatial organisation of the social division of labour.

  In Marx’s terms, the social division of labour is distinct from the technical division of labour, in that it arises from social functions related to class.  Under capitalism, the social division of labour is organised around personalized bonds between the feudal lord and the peasant or serf.  The major form of extraction was directly political – the ruling class took tribute by means of coercion – and this tended to produce both a parcellisation of political authority and disarticulation of space.  The rural-urban divide, the patchwork of spaces ranging from estates and small towns to great commercial centres and ports to walled cities, condensed a particular social division of labour.  In the countryside, the producer was bound to the soil working for nobles of various rank on estates of varying size with porous frontiers and no clear boundaries.  Towns varied greatly in size and function; some were enclaves of relative commercial freedom, particularly port towns connected to world markets; smaller towns were usually abutments to large feudal estates.  Their inhabitants did not live off the land and produce tribute, but rather lived off petty commodity manufacture, or various types of trade serving the luxury consumption of the feudal ruling class.  (On the rural-urban divide in the middle ages, see Rodney Hilton).  The major form of ideological dominance being religious, there were overlapping frameworks of sacred and secular power, the church acting as landlord, tithe collector, and symbolic guarantor of the unity of the state as the body of Christ.  This specific articulation of economic, political and ideological power was also the basis for the checkered system of miscellaneous polities, from communes  to city-states to empires.  So, the territorialization of political power under feudalism, based on bonds to lord and land, was such that spaces tended to be irregular, reversible, turned in on themselves (though bonds to lord and land) yet simultaneously open (through extensive migration across intersecting boundaries).

  Where the capitalist mode of production took root, however, producers obtained their famous dual freedom, from both lord (bondage) and land (the means of labour); they were drawn into relations of production mediated through exchange, selling their labour power to capitalists who procured it as just one element in a productive process intended to produce a profit.  However, as Poulantzas pointed out, this did not entail deterritorialization; such a schema relied on a naturalist image in which territory was assumed to have a continuous meaning, connotatively linked to ‘rootedness’ in determinate plots of land.  Rather, the capitalist division of labour entailed a different type of territorialization.  Production, circulation and exchange now demanded a spatial matrix of imperfectly homogenized sites, segments of space each carefully delimited by clear frontier marking insides and outsides and linked to a social division of labour – factories, hubs, supply chains, shopping centres, terraces, conurbations, condominiums, and so on.  So while the movements of money, capital and labour would tend to push beyond these spaces, they must cross frontiers in order to do so.  This system of boundaries is necessary to organise the labour force, the distribution and storage of goods, communications, transport, consumption, residences, and so on.  It is necessary to help regularise an already anarchic system of production and minimise its dysfunctions: for example, they help impose a general sedentarization on the labour force (see James Scott on this) that makes its supply more predictable and its constituents intelligible.

  The specific combination of cooperative and competitive relations in the division of labour also has effects on the spatial matrix.  Production, distribution and exchange must necessarily take place in a cooperative manner, meaning that capital units are locked in a relation of interdependence.  This will produce a tendency toward clustering, as functionally associated capitals reduce their distance from one another: it makes sense, for instance, that large manufacturing enterprises would tend to cluster in industrial estates near large workforces with access to main road; or that commercial enterprises would cluster on high streets in pedestrian and motorist accessible centres where consumption can take place.  On the other hand, this cooperative effort is structured by competitive accumulation.  Some capitals will succeed better than others, and over the long-term there will be a concentration and centralization of capitals, which themselves attract chains of supporting industries, producing spaces (towns, cities, even countries) which work as privileged centres of productive capital, and by extension other spaces that are underdeveloped and neglected.

  Political authority under capitalism, rather than being directly embedded in those sites through a chain of significations linking land to labourer to lord, acquired a formal separation or relative autonomy from them.  Indeed, part of its role was to help constitute this new spatial matrix by standing in a formal sense ‘outside’ it, while ‘intervening’ constantly.  The scare quotes are necessary, because it is clear that in no real sense does the state have an external relationship to the spheres of production or exchange.  This is where the state-derivation approach produces an important insight: breaking with the fetishised notion of the state, with the legal, constitutional image of the state as simply an external guardian of civil society, it treats the state as a social relationship, actively involved in the constitution of the totality of social relationships in part by separating off aspects of them and deeming them ‘political’ as opposed to ‘economic’.  This is consistent with Corrigan and Sayer’s important argument that ‘the state’ as such is a fiction, a ‘mythicized abstraction’; it is through the state relation itself that the social categories are produced to give it its seeming legal and institutional determinacy, its “misplaced concreteness”.

  Still, despite the above, and despite the spatial metaphor deployed, this ‘standing outside’ adverts to a real political relationship which is the state’s relative autonomy from social classes.  As Claus Offe put it, this relative autonomy is necessary to capitalism because only a “fully harmonious economic system that did not trigger self-destructive processes of socialization could tolerate the complete positive subordination of the normative-ideological and political systems to itself."  It is the fact that capitalist production is not a self-sufficient system, that it has inherent crisis tendencies, and arguably the fact that is articulated with other systems (ecological, biological, etc.), which makes it so inherently unstable and requires a state with the freedom to provide a spatio-temporal fix.  Another relevant feature of capitalist production is the ‘isolation effect’ it produces in social classes.  Because it is a system of competitive accumulation among many producers, and because capital is constitutively divided into fractions, the capitalist class finds it impossible to constitute its political dominance over the popular classes without the state, which cannot therefore be an ‘instrument’ or ‘tool’ for the capitalist class as such.   So the apparent extrusion of political authority from the organization of the spatial matrices of production, circulation and consumption is actually nothing other than the formal separation of the political from the economic; the state remains deeply involved in and articulated with the processes of capital accumulation, constituting the segments of space through its schools, police, armed forces, councils, parking authorities, free enterprise zones, etc.  And through its action it seeks to unify and homogenize those spaces; but how?

  In the capitalist mode of production, the dominant form of ideology is no longer religious but political; in normal circumstances, the capitalist state presents itself as a popular, representative state (even if not actually democratic).  It does so firstly by binding itself to a nation, an ‘imagined community’, usually with a shared language.  But to represent the nation as such, it must dissolve classes at an ideological level into individualised subjects, who are then cemented together through the state; the dominant ideological form this takes is legal; the law produces the ‘free and equal’ subject of the bourgeois nation-state.  This is connected to the enclosure of a ‘national’ space, which is obviously by no means a natural space (though of course national expansiveness is necessarily responsive to natural resources, and the spatial matrix of production is warped around them).  Just as the segments of space at the level of factories, bureaucratic offices or towns are circumscribed by a clear frontier as part of the logic of organising the social division of labour, so the state constitutes the national space by erecting a frontier around it, a system of exclusion and filtered admission (of labour, goods, etc) which is operated on behalf of the nation.  

  Not only that, but the state effectively operates a system of internal borders, whereby those who are deemed non-national or anti-national can be confined, brutalised, hyper-exploited, etc. – this can range from detention centres for asylum seekers to concentration camps; from Jim Crow laws restricting movement to secret prisons.  This too has a certain relationship to the social division of labour, insofar as the latter is constituted by politics and ideology.  Capitalism has always shown a marked tendency to stratify labour forces according to principles of race, nationality, religion, gender, ethnicity, and so on, in a way that enhances the political dominance of capital over labour and increases the rate of exploitation of all workers over the long-term.  As Roediger and Esch’s accounts of ‘race management’ would demonstrate, this is not something that simply takes place at the level of the state; such strategies are implemented and experimented with directly in productive enterprises.  But the state also develops strategies for the control of labour forces, for example by obstructing the mobility of some workers to discourage migration at some points or render migrant workers insecure at others, or implementing material incentives in a gendered way so as to preserve a family structure in which women perform the labour of reproducing labour (ie maintaining a household, raising children, feeding male workers etc).  The system of both internal and external frontiers is part of the organization and disciplining of the pyramid.

  This directs one’s attention to what the legal concept of the border, as simply an arbitrary political cleavage separating nation from non-nation, obscures: the fact that the frontier is a set of social (economic, political, ideological) relations, mediated through the state, between the contending classes bound by it; between the many capitals based within it and those beyond it; between national oppressed and dominant groups, and those beyond the nation; and between social formations unified by respective national states, whether imperialist or non-imperialist.  The transgression of frontiers naturally also represents one moment in a given social relationship, be it oppression (refugee flows), exploitation (labour migration), social resistance and class struggle (breaking out or breaking in), or imperialism (invasion, bombing).  The point I’m making here is that the most important fact about national states is not that there are many of them, although logically there must be and this is important; it is the social relations embedded in them, which make them national states.

***

  So, rather than deriving the appropriate type of territoriality of the capitalist state from one of the general formal elements of the capitalist mode of production, I have suggested multiple levels of determination beginning with the overall social division of labour, proceeding to the organisation of political authority specific to capitalism, the dominant form of ideological domination under capitalism, the type of relation between capitals, and between different groups of workers, and the effects of these determinants on each other.  I am not claiming to have been exhaustive, but approaching it in this way gives one a superior perspective on the different orders of scale and space that characterise the capitalist world system and particularly allows one to understand why the key strategic base at which territorial statehood is organised is the nation and is likely to continue to be the nation.  Of course, the specific unity between nation and state is a practical unity, not one that is given in the theoretical understanding of capitalism.  Nations are not essential to capitalism.  However, in any counterfactual scenario of capitalism’s emergence and development, the world system would most likely be constituted by a graduated system of spaces at the strategic centre of which would be something like national states.

  And it’s worth thinking about how this hierarchy of oedipal territories, this very tightly controlled grid of social spaces from the main public square to the prison, dense with symbols and ideology as they are, are so important to capitalist political dominance.  I don’t claim that actually controlling this or that bit of space is the most important thing about capitalist territoriality – no, it is the social relations embodied in the space that is central.  I have said these segmented spaces are ‘containers’ for social relations in which an implied set of social expectations and responses are condensed.  Because of this, there is a strategic hierarchy; some spaces are worth more than others, because the social relations they embody are more important than others to reproducing the system.  

  A certain approach to anticapitalist struggle focuses on taking over spaces, and creating autonomous zones which are simultaneously protest, pedagogy and prefiguration.  This has been tried with the Occupy movement, and has demonstrated some real strengths in all three capacities.  But it has clearly reached its limits inasmuch as the capitalist state has learned, through trial and error, how to regain control of such spaces.  And to the extent that the strategy was bound up with a longer term perspective of, piece-by-piece, liberating space and building communism on a cellular level, it was never going to work.  For, if it is worth claiming autonomous spaces, then it has to be asked why those actually claimed outside of actual revolutionary situations (and then only for a short period) have always been strategically negligible, of marginal importance to the reproduction of the system.  The answer is most likely that the politically important spaces are always very well organised and manned, while it would be unwise to occupy strategically important productive spaces unless the workers already agree with you, in which case they should be doing it.  That leaves public and semi-public spaces, and a few vacated buildings.  Not exactly the Paris Commune; not even the parish commune.  And since the national state is the privileged level of the political organization of the territory, capturing visible but strategically marginal space is always at best a short-term tactic, doomed as it is to encirclement and shut-down in short order.  The only sensible answer is to re-focus on the social relations that are constituted through a particular organization of space, and try to organize the agencies best placed to disrupt their reproduction.

In lieu of more substantive matter which I'm busy working on, and because I have so much else to do, I'm just posting up these possibly interesting reflections on ideology which I threw together this morning in a fit of ennui.

Where do you get those ideas from? There is an extremely high chance that most of them were produced by others for you, that you came by them in schools, your family, from the mass media, maybe a religious institution, from a political party, a trade union, the academia, think-tanks, PR firms or any one of a network of institutions or apparatuses which make it their business to produce ideas for you. (Yes, you - this is interpellation we are talking about here.)  This is how Goran Therborn in one of his early works, The Power of Ideology and the Ideology of Power, visualises the process:

I know this isn't a shock. You didn't really think you came up with those thoughts all by yourself. You are Marxists, and you know very well that ideologies (and sciences for that matter) are produced collectively, even if not in a collectivist mode.  Or, if you prefer, they are historically, socially produced.

But what do those who aren't Marxists think? Aren't they often inclined to believe that somehow their ideas are spontaneous, natural, or arise from a process of open-ended personal reflection? I was going to say it was a particularly petty bourgeois illusion, but it seems to be implicit in ideology as such, the belief that ideas are the result of some inner spark or inspiration: in theoretical language, that agents, rather than being constituted as subjects by ideology, are the constituting subjects of ideology.  "I decide what I think," the subject of ideology says, "I mean, yes, there are all sorts of ideas being presented to me every day, but as soon as I obtain adulthood I am in a position to critically evaluate those ideas.  I choose my ideology; it doesn't choose me."  In this sense, the concept of interpellation is an affront to common sense, for it says that ideology 'chooses' its subject, that it addresses the subject with who she really is, enabling her to become the 'bearer' (Trager) of the role assigned to her by the structure.

We won't spend too long inspecting the structure of this interpellation.  Althusser sets up a primordial 'scene' of interpellation, a fable in which the agent is 'hailed' by the law ("hey you!"), stops, turns, and in the act of turning is subjectivated, accepts that she really is the "you" addressed by law.  Crucially, this submission to ideology involves misrecognition: as with Lacan's 'mirror stage', the resulting identity is a false totalization of the fragments of experience.

Following Judith Butler, we could problematize this concept along the following lines.  Althusser relies on a complex set of theological figures to set up his notion of 'hailing'.  The very act of 'turning' and thus accepting subjectivation implies an act of conscience, an appropriation of guilt.  For Althusser, ideology is centred around an imaginary 'Absolute Subject' - redolent of Lacan's 'Big Other', the guarantor of the symbolic order - which is experienced by the subject as the source of 'law', guaranteeing that (so long as you are a good subject and 'behave') everything is just as it seems and will continue to be for eternity, and will be okay.  Religious ideology is thus treated as exemplary of ideology as such, the 'naming' in religious ritual typical of subjectivation.  There is no mystery about this - Althusser practised Catholicism long after he became a marxist, and seems never to have got out of the habit of performing some of its rituals.  But this process requires an addressee already predisposed to receiving such a message, already implicated in its terms; that is, it requires a subjection that already presupposes a subject. 

At first it seems as if we're saying that the narrative of the 'scene' of interpellation cannot be 'true'.  But, of course, as Butler also notes, this concept of interpellation is allegorical.  It stages a 'hailing' that never actually literally happens in this way; it narrativises a process or set of processes that is said to be resistant to narrativization.  As Butler has it, "the 'call' arrives severally and in implicit and unspoken ways", which a too literal reading of 'interpellation' might overlook.  There is a long process in which each agent in the division of labour is equipped with, for example, the sorts of linguistic skills appropriate to her location, which will enable her to carry out the tasks assigned to her by the structure: a boss learns to 'speak properly' (ie authoritatively, persuasively, dominatively) to her employees; a worker learns to 'speak properly' (ie deferentially, respectfully, warily) back.  Over time, the agent becomes a subject by internalising the rules and attitudes, materialised in actions, inserted into practices, governed by rituals, which constitute the subject.  The agent, just as she is mastering these skills, submits to the dominant ideology: is 'hailed', 'turns' to face the law, and is subjectivated. The fabular character of 'interpellation' is one reason why the many pointed criticisms of the 'scene' depicted by Althusser - for example, that it is is too dyadic, or is phallocentric - are thoroughly well-founded, yet far from adequate to finish off the concept of interpellation.  The scene could be re-staged in multiple thoughtful and creative ways without losing what is essential.

However, Butler's case is more complex.  It is not simply that the 'scene' belies the reality of ideology in many ways.  The problem lies in the prehistory of the subject alluded to above; the preconditions necessary for the reproduction of the dominant ideology.  'Interpellation' appears to require an anxious, knowing, 'guilty' agent anxious to acquit herself by conscientiously mastering the skills that will make her a subject.  Doesn't this, as Lacanian critics approvingly suggest, require another dimension to the subject, a materia prima, or rather an immateria prima, a psychic dimension that is radically distinct from any possible incarnation in material practices?  Doesn't it require the resuscitation of the Cartesian subject?  Doesn't Althusser's repudiation of the ontological dualism of the material and the ideal simply collapse into another dualism?  Butler's rejoinder to the Lacanians (in the person of Mladen Dolar) is that: i) it mistakes a grammatical requirement for a pre-existing subject, or psychic remainder, in the context of exposition for a logical requirement; and ii) its rejection of materialist monism relies on a reduction of the material to the phenomenal, or empirically given, so that the absences that punctuate a ritual can be seen as governed by a non-material symbolic order - in counterpoint, Butler deploys the althusserian materialism of articulation, in which these absences are not 'ideal' but are bound to the phenomenon as "its constitutive and absent necessity".

Nonetheless, the terms of Althusser's formulation, the theological figures deployed and particularly the restrictive role of conscience in subject-formation, leave unresolved the question of the failure of interpellation.  In Althusser's terms it is difficult to think how a 'bad subject' could exist, since the very condition of being a subject involves mastering the skills that subject one to the dominant ideology and make one therefore a 'good' subject.  

Now, Butler doesn't do any more than signpost possible ways out of this dilemma: hinting at forms of de-subjectivation which might allow one to oppose the 'law' without denying one's complicity in it.  But it's clear that without resolving this, the danger is either that one collapses into a mechanistic, functionalist account of ideology, or a voluntarism or decisionism predicated implicitly or explicitly on this theological remainder.  Althusser didn't solve this problem.  As Jameson points out, the ISA essay was "programmatic", a manifesto of sorts, an "agenda, still incompletely fulfilled".  And I will have occasion to talk about the politics of this in a future post.  However, I would say that this psychic remainder, this kernel of interiority irreducible to the social and material world, constantly recurs in marxist accounts of ideology, either explicitly or in the form of ambiguities or silences.

The ambiguity, or unresolved tension, in historical materialist approaches to ideology is basically this: is ideology materially determined, or is it a material substance in itself?  This is an ambiguity which persists in one of the greatest marxist writers on ideology, Volosinov who, asserting that his approach is monistic, nonetheless makes this statement: "Every ideological sign is not only a reflection, a shadow of reality, but is also a material segment of that very reality."  Not only, but also.  Not just shadow, but material too.  Does this seem like a detail?  Well, I can't be the only one to have encountered this sort of ambivalence repeatedly.  Goran Therborn, arguing from a post-althusserian perspective, tended to speak of the material determination of ideas, leaving the question of ideology's ideal or material status unresolved.  

Or one encounters more directly formulations which tell us that "mind is developed upon the basis of matter", but that "the human mind cannot simply be reduced to matter". And is this not simply a straightforward exposition of Marx's approach in The German Ideology?  For on the one hand, Marx says that "neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life", while on the other these manifestations are "phantoms formed in the human brain ... sublimates of their material life-process ... bound to material premises".  And so, the ambiguity seems to be resolved on the side of the material determination of ideas, which are but "phantoms".

If in fact the ambiguity is to be resolved in this way, that is if we accept that there is an order of reality that is separate from matter (a subjective reality, a 'consciousness' that is linked to the material world but not directly or wholly of it), then it is surely at the expense of monism.  To say that this is a consequence of such a stance is not necessarily to disprove it.  And it is clear why it is attractive: precisely because of the need to found emancipatory politics on the self-activity of the masses, and therefore the need to explain the bases of resistance.  Somehow, the working class is capable of being an agent of revolutionary change, despite the effects of the dominant ideology.

So when Althusser argued that ideology has no "ideal or spiritual existence" but only a material existence, that it exists only "in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices" - gamesomely suggesting that readers entertain the notion sympathetically on the grounds of materialism - surely he was expressing a conception that was deeply controversial to the majority of marxists.  At least, particularly  for those of a Lukacsian persuasion, such a conception must appear to be complicit in the objectification that is characteristic of ideology as such.  For if ideas themselves are material, then its bearers might well be nothing but objects; nothing but effects of a structure, bearers (Trager) of a role assigned to them by the structure.  There would seem to be no space for will or intention ('consciousness') in such a process.  So, it is this potentially mechanistic consequence of theoretical anti-humanism that is objectionable.

But, returning to Marx's formulation in The German Ideology, if ideas are "only manifestations of actual life", in what sense are they manifest?  To whom and in what they do they manifest themselves, if not in fact in the material practices and apparatuses?  In what sense are ideas other than "actual life"?  Is it not at least arguable that in such moments, Marx was using an old conception (the ideal-material dichotomy) to express an emerging one (the different levels of determination in a complex social whole, the relative autonomy and specific effectivity of ideology)?  Elsewhere in The German Ideology Marx says, in what I think is a satirical moment, that "thoughts and ideas acquire an independent existence" only when a certain division of labour creates agents who produce thoughts and ideas independently.  In other words, the ideological conception of thoughts and ideas having an ideal existence is an illusion that arises from the social practices of petty bourgeois producers of ideology.

Approaching this from another point of view, part of the argument hinges on the base-superstructure metaphor and how it is deployed.  It is difficult to miss the way in which, when some theorists talk about the 'material', they refer to the realm of production, productive relations, commodity circulation - indeed, all that which appears as 'the economy'.  The issue that is being addressed in the language of the 'material determination of ideology' is nothing other than the determination of ideology by productive relations, class struggle and all of the various attributes of the social formation apart from its ideologies.  And a very important reason why people don't want to 'reduce' ideology to matter is precisely because of the need to recognise the specific effectivity of ideology, its peculiar forms and instantiations.  

After all, the question of 'reduction' shouldn't really arise otherwise: it is not a question of saying that ideology is 'reducible' to matter; merely that it is itself a material process.  'Reduction' only comes into it because the ontological problem of the status of ideology (as matter, or ideal substance) has been interjected into the epistemological problem posed by the base-superstructure metaphor (of the relationship between economy, politics and ideology in marxist theory).  And if I'm right in suggesting this, then surely the ISAs essay opened up a potentially fruitful terrain of investigation in solving this latter problem, drawing attention to the various mediating levels particular to ideology (actions, practices, rituals, apparatuses), but also opening up the field of the specific institutional preconditions of ideology.  Not only that, but this demarche is conducted within a sophisticated and potentially dynamic account of the determination and overdetermination of ideologies by the whole complex structure which it is articulated to; that is, it allows us to shift the terms of the problem from the 'material determination of ideology' to that of the complex and mediated determination of ideology by the sub-structures with which it is articulated.  I just suggest we consider it - in the name of materialism, say.

But that still leaves us with the other dilemma.  So, we hypothesise that ideology has only a material and no spiritual or ideal existence; that the relationship between ideology and 'politics' or 'the economy' is not that between matter and the ideal.  Doesn't it still seem that, for the masses to be capable of conducting a revolutionary self-emancipation, we need some notion of resistant interiority, some equivalent to Chomsky's (obviously deliberately simplified) notion of an 'instinct for freedom'?  That is, a conception of 'human nature' as an active constituent in the process of subject-formation?  It will not be sufficient to clarify, as Marta Harnecker exhaustively does, what theoretical anti-humanism does and does not entail for the self-emancipation of the working class.  The point is that the problem is raised about how to understand the basis for resistance, including resistance to the dominant ideology.  And, as we have said, that problem wasn't satisfactorily dealt with in the terms of Althusser's original formulations.  

I don't propose, in this post, to articulate the solution that evaded both Althusser and Butler.  I merely want to reiterate that we can't fall back on any conception of 'interiority', which risks reifying socially, ideologically produced divisions (the interior-exterior division is nothing other than the mind-body problem in another idiom anyway).  Still less can we find salvation in 'human nature'.  Insofar as it goes beyond a simple description of biological needs (for food, warmth, sociality, orgasm) or needs derivative of those (eg, the need to appropriate knowledge which meets those primary needs), which by itself would be neither 'interior' nor an adequate explanation for social resistance, and proceeds into a theology of some 'natural' state of unity with our 'species-being', alienated since the Fall, it restores idealism.  What theories of 'human nature' must invariably do is eternize contingent and historically produced relations and situations.  Such solutions are worse than the problem they address.  If a theory of subjects capable of explaining resistance is available, it must be on the terms of the materialist approach to ideology; that is, of ideology's purely material and not spiritual or ideal existence.

What follows, then, is one attempt to navigate beyond this impasse.  I hasten to say that this is intended as the beginning of an argument, since I can't claim to have resolved every tension or lacuna in my position.  I will also say upfront that it tries to solve the problem in a largely formal way with only incidental references, by way of examples, to the kinds of historical data that will stand up the argument presented here.  That is mainly to keep the argument under some sort of control.  Doing the subject historical and historiographical justice would require a book, and I don't know how to write one of those.

There are those on the Left who adopt a version the law-violence dichotomy.   E P Thompson, as I mentioned in a previous post, was one of those.  In a concluding discussion in his book, Whigs and Hunters: Origin of the Black Act, Thompson acknowledges the structural selectivity of law, asserting not merely that it has been used as an 'instrument' by the ruling class, but that its very form has been such that it tends to produce outcomes favourable to the reproduction of class domination.  Nonetheless, he reaches this striking conclusion in defence of the 'rule of law':   

In assessing this, I think we have to take into account the related contexts of Thompson's theoretical commitments and his politics of socialist humanism.  In his famed attack on Althusser, The Poverty of Theory, one of the points he made was that law did not politely keep to one level, but could be found busily constituting and mediating conflicts at every level of society.  He thus rejected the base-superstructure metaphor, and particularly the althusserian version which held that the different levels of this structure were 'relatively autonomous'.  The same argument can be found in Whigs and Hunters, which draws out what is intended to be an implication of this: law is not merely a superstructural imposition 'from above', but a medium through which the oppressed and exploited conducted their struggles.  Thus the ideology of the 'freeborn Englishman' could be estimated an excellent one, the 'notion' of the rule of law and its supposed equity an unqualified human good.  The challenge was to compel the law to live up to its promise, and the ultimate condition for its fulfilment was the abolition of the class systems which perverted and distorted the law.

Politically, this commitment was related to Thompson's rejection of Stalinism.  It requires no great stretch of the imagination to see why a certain radical English liberalism would be a comfort in the face of 'totalitarian' Eastern tyranny: the gap between 'arbitrary power' and 'the rule of law' seems quite obvious when separated by an iron curtain.  (I don't suggest that Stalinism was actually characterised by an absence of the 'rule of law', but I think that's implicit in Thompson's view, just as it is explicit in many marxist accounts of Nazi rule).  Of at least equal import, though, is his political disappointment, his retirement from activism by the late 1960s, and his complete befuddlement and hostility in the face of the second New Left.  Thompson's weary impatience with young marxists bemoaning 'the fuzz' is of a piece with his disdain for May 1968 as "a rich kid's revolutionary farce", his wariness about Third World revolution, trendy Parisian philosophers and all of the concerns of the New Left which struck him as either modish or politically immature.  To this extent, 'Stalinism' could function as a polemical convenience, enfolding within its compass a range of political and theoretical positions which were disagreeable to the English idiom and romantic moralism that he unapologetically deployed.  In this sense, I think Thompson bears out Althusser's claim that the post-1956 turn to humanism among formerly Stalinized marxists represented a 'right-wing' de-Stalinization; the introduction of feeble bourgeois ideologies of 'liberty' and 'humanity' into marxism was but the mood music for a rapprochement with liberalism.  Still, there are stronger grounds on which one might criticise Thompson's account here, chief among which is that his anti-theoreticist and empiricist tendencies, leave him without the theoretical means to fully break with the 'instrumentalist' account of the law that he is criticising.  I'll come back to this.

Another example of a leftist defence of the law, from a left-reformist perspective, would be Ian Taylor's arguments which were influential on the Labour Left in the early 1980s.  In his article 'Against Crime and For Socialism', Taylor sought to define a leftist defence of law in the context of growing social turmoil and dislocation arising from capitalist crisis and Thatcherite austerity.  The idea was that the left had failed to produce a convincing answer to popular anxieties about crime, largely because it was stuck in two irrelevant analytical modes: either revolutionary anti-statism, or social democratic authoritarianism.  Any analysis which began with a monolithic view of the state, as an instrument for class domination or an uncontested terrain dominated by a single class interest, was intellectually simplistic and strategically barren.  Taylor's argument suggested that law and the state were contested terrains, and he championed the 'community' response to crime favoured by the Bennite Left, organizing local campaigns while imposing democratic and accountable structures on the police so far as possible.  The obverse of this 'community' based politics was a reproach to criminality as anti-social behaviour.  Crime, he argued, was an ideological category which worked on real social material to produce the phenomenon of 'underclass' or 'lower class' criminality.  Thus, the left had to challenge the ideology by displacing the real content from its rightist-populist articulations.  The argument that criminality derived from despair, worklessness, inequality and poverty would not do.  Rather, criminal behaviour was really a kind of self-interested enterprise, distributed across classes in different ways, and a product largely of capitalist individualism.  Among the 'lower class' elements, crime arose from the breakdown of solidaristic communities, or from layers that had never been part of a cohesive, 'respectable' working class.  Social order was worth defending against this sort of predation; policing was an absolute necessity; but it had to be conducted on a popular socialist basis which simultaneously deployed policies to rebuild and stabilise afflicted communities.

This was a very common argument on sections of the Left, especially in the context of E P Thompson's intervention.  Stripped of its more radical prescriptions, the basic analysis of crime as anti-social individualism became the basis for a new authoritarianism within the Labour Party, eventually grounding Tony Blair's 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' campaign and New Labour's punitive campaigns against anti-social behaviour.  Of course, this idea of crime as a form of self-interested enterprise was also offered as an explanation for last summer's riots.  It is vapid: capitalist individualism is everywhere, but crime is not.  Nor is crime necessarily conducted on the basis of 'rational self-interest'.  For all the frankly idiotic commentary freaking out about the theft of consumer goods during the riots, one thing that stood out was the frequency with which those involved acted without reference to material self-aggrandisement, often placing themselves in harm's way in order to conduct sometimes successful but ultimately futile fights with the law.  Altruism, group solidarity and a desire for collective adventure and liberation were salient features of the riots.  Part of the problem here is polysemy: that is, it can mean so many things to say, as Taylor does, that law is ideology.  Quite what that means in practice depends on your conception of ideology and its scope.  I would argue that Taylor, influenced by certain Gramscian motifs, treated 'crime' as an ideological category only inasmuch as it was manipulated by the Right, not inasmuch as it was produced by the ideological action of the law itself.  But again, this I will return to.

What I want to stress is that these kinds of arguments, correctly attempting to oppose a simple theory of law as an expression of class domination, miss what is central to law.  It isn't adequate to say that law mediates the actions of the powerful, and that such mediation is an improvement on unmediated power.  There is no such thing as unmediated power: no way that power could not be materialized in a particular medium.  And what is the medium here?  What accounts for the 'lawness' of law?  Wherein resides the specific aspect that makes legality what it is?  I will develop an argument about this, but the first clue is the constant presence of violence.  If law is a scene of contestation, what decides is violence.  If law has an imperative character, what gives it compulsory force is violence.  To the extent that law is operative at all, it is nothing other than "congealed violence".  Law is, in this aspect, nothing other than a particular organization of violence.

An example from history.  In a previous post, I discussed the 'Massive Resistance' mounted by Southern states in the wake of Brown vs. the Board of Education.  A series of Supreme Court rulings, from Smith vs. Allwright to Brown vs. the Board of Education, and then subsequent fast-track endorsement of the federal government's right to impose Voting Rights, challenged the white supremacist system in various of its aspects.  There was no claim here that the Court was interested in immediate reform.  The approach was to phrase such decisions in such a way as to grant maximum leverage to Southern states in the timing, scale and manner in which they de-segregated.

Importantly, much of the relevant scholarship is explicit in stating that the outcome of these arguments was determined less by the juridical arguments, deduction-from-precedent and so on, than by politics. It was the more centralized, 'interventionist' state arising from the 'New Deal', and a judiciary reconfigured by FDR, that made the difference in a very short space of time between a pro-segregation Supreme Court and one that was imposing reform. Later, the Truman administration's amicus curiae on the international ramifications of segregation made all the difference in Brown vs. the Board of Education. Putting a marxist gloss on this, I argued that underlying this development was i) the rise of monopoly capital and inter-regional firms requiring a further centralization and rationalization of the state of a kind that had begun in the 1910s, and having a different relationship to racial formations than plantation or textile capital, ii) the strategic shift in the Democratic Party's base in response to the emergence of an immigrant working class vote in the North, union insurgency and the growth of the African American vote outside of the South, and iii) the delayed emergence of a civil rights movement effectively deploying disruptive power to force the question and lever open divisions within the ruling class.

At any rate, this process - a Second Reconstruction by many accounts - necessitated the re-organization of state violence in the constitution of class relations. This was manifested quite literally in the federalization of national guards, the use of 101st Airborne, and so on, to physically coerce local state authorities into complying and dropping the various city ordinances, state laws, policing and parapolitical operations comprising 'Massive Resistance'. Between the state of Kentucky and the central state, force (not 'sovereignty', 'states' rights', the constitution, etc.) decided.  Law revealed itself to be, in a sense, nothing but congealed violence.

'Equality before the law' is a cardinal principle of liberal-democratic ideology, and it is one that historians like E P Thompson, and sympathetic theorists, have taken very seriously.  Thompson's critique of the inequities of law, of unjust law, took as its standard the principle of legal equity itself: of the civil and political rights of the 'freeborn Englishman'.  A certain type of marxist critique of this notion holds that it is a purely formal equality which conceals or conveys a content of inequality.  Such, as we will see, is the position of Evgeny Pashukanis.  This is not to say that such a critique must deny the efficacy of formal equality - on the contrary, Pashukanis' work is an attempt to comprehend this formal equality as part of the fundamental, cellular structure of law.  But it involves a different emphasis.  It is not that the law poses a standard of equality which it doesn't realise in practice, but rather that the legal relationship between abstract, formally equal individuals is just the form that class domination takes in a capitalist society characterised by generalised commodity exchange.

Against both interpretations, which actually converge in some of their fundamental assumptions, I want to suggest that the law does not give us formal equality.  Agents are assigned a bundle of rights and obligations depending on their location within the relations of production, such that their formal legal position with respect to one another, irrespective of how these rights and obligations are realised or elaborated in the process of jurisprudence, is not one of equality.  At the most simple level, a capitalist is not equal with a worker, even at the 'formal' legal level.  It will surely be objected that this refers to the substantive content of law, not its form.  Such a reproach is related to schools which treat the legal form as a foundational grammar of abstract legal subjects derived from certain aspects of the capitalist mode of production - most notably, as mentioned, the Pashukanis school which treats the legal form as a derivative of or homologous with the commodity form.  But I don't think the 'form' of law is restricted to its most abstract expression, even if one accepts the grammar of the commodity-law homology.  There are different levels of abstraction at which 'form' makes itself known.  Putting it like this entails that, if the form-content dichotomy is to be useful, it must be revised.  In its current articulation, it seems as if form is something settled at the highest level of abstraction, and content is settled at the highest level of concreteness.  Arguably, however, one finds 'form' and a corresponding 'content' from the first abstraction to the last concrete-in-thought.

As importantly, I am inclined to doubt that the commodity form theory explains what it is supposed to.  Let me reiterate the problem briefly.  The question of the 'legalness' of law comes up for a number of reasons.  First, because in order to truly understand the iniquitous 'content' of law it must be stated why that 'content' - class power, racism, patriarchy, etc - takes the 'form' that it does.  Second, because it is not possible to understand what law does in capitalism specifically, and in particular social formations, without understanding what makes it law in the first place.  That is, what is definitive of law across historical epochs and modes of production, and what is specific to this mode of production.  The Pashukanisian argument is that the legal form is the commodity form; that legal relations first appear in the exchange of commodities between formally free and equal subjects. The commodity relation depends on the items for sale being exchanged between formally equal subjects, who each enter the transaction as voluntary participants, as bearers of rights, particularly property rights.  And it is through this relationship that the legal form is "congealed violence".  For in such transactions, inescapably, there is the potential for one party to alienate the property of the other without consent, which must not happen if it is to be a true commodity relationship.  In the real process of such transactions, of course, coercion almost always intervenes in some way and at some level.  Either it structures the contract of exchange itself, or it calls into question the interpretation of the contract, thus producing a process of legal argument that can ultimately only be terminated through superior violence.  So it is that the grammar of abstract, formally equal legal subjects 'congeals' violence and domination, and the main forms of violence are of course class violence.  It is not that law's promise of equality simply can't be realised in the capitalist mode of production, but rather that this formal equality is the language that class domination under capitalism must speak in.

This seems to answer a number of problems.  First of all, it offers an apparently smooth transition between the determinant structure, the commodity form, and the resulting superstructure, law.  Second, it seems to allow us to pinpoint both the historical continuity of law and its discontinuity: the commodity form may explain the legal form in general, but it is only with the generalization of commodity circulation under capitalism that law expands from localised instances of contract to a universal structure.  Third, it seems to show the precise moment at which violence and consent are mutually articulated in the legal form.  It is so elegant a solution, and absolutely consistent with certain lines of Marx's thought.  But still, I don't think it does quite what it seems to.  First, the smoothness of the transition here is only apparent - unless the homology is reduced to sheer coincidence, unless the legal form just is the commodity form.  The latter is, I think, China Mieville's position.  In what appears to be a deft theoretical innovation, he argues that the law is split between the legal form, which is the commodity form and is proper to the base, and the practice of law, which is a superstructural phenomenon.  Thus, the legal form is but a particular juridical iteration of the commodity form, which is activated and materialized at a different (superstructural, political-ideological) level. 

Again, this is an attractive solution, but I will stick to my position.  I think this conception is inseparable from a set of positions on the base-superstructure controversy which are perfectly arguable but which I suggest we reject. First, China, following Pashukanis, rejects the analysis of law as ideology on the grounds that it reduces law to a set of ideas in people's heads.  Yes, there are all sorts of ideological aspects to, and ramifications of, the law; but, per Pashukanis, we must seek the "objective reality" of law "in the outside world", as opposed to merely the "subjective reality".  This desire to find the specific materiality of the law is part of the reason why Pashukanis tries to trace the legal form to the base, into which he subsumes commodity circulation.  As I will argue in a moment, however, this rests on an unnecessarily reductive conception of ideology.  In fact, it is an idealist conception of ideology which is at fault here, not the suggestion that law is ideology.  Althusser's argument that ideology consists of  "material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals" strikes me as the beginning of a superior approach.

Second, relatedly, the argument seems to me to rest on the idea that the superstructure stands in a purely external relationship to the base.  Thus, if the legal form just is the commodity form in a juridical iteration, it must belong to the base, forming part of the foundational structure that will then give rise to a superstructure in which the class-determined 'content' of law will be elaborated.  If, however, you don't assume this relationship of exteriority, it makes sense to see the different levels of the structure as being imbricated, mutually articulated.  Ideology, politics, law, etc., are constantly iterating different aspects of productive relations in their own idiom, constantly intervening, constantly constituting and being constituted by those relations.  And I would say that the fact that there is a juridical iteration indicates that it is already a superstructural phenomenon.  In itself, accepting this way of looking at it doesn't have to pose a problem for the Pashukanis school.  It is quite possible for this juridical iteration of the commodity form to be a superstructural form and still comprise the cellular structure of law.  However, this does allow us to displace the problem.  With Pashukanis, we're trying to locate the materiality of the law in a property of the infrastructure.  Instead, we can now think about ways in which the mutual articulation of infrastructural and superstructural levels determines both the form and content of law.  And that means, we can allow that the form of law is determined by more than one property of the infrastructure, by more than commodity circulation - we can introduce, at different levels of abstraction, productive relations, the social and technical division of labour, the geo-economic unity of a social formation, class struggle and so on.

Moreover, it enables us to think the continuity and discontinuity of law in a far more specific way.  In the Pashukanisian scheme, the emergence and persistence of law is coterminous with the emergence and persistence of markets and commodity trade.  What persists is the basic legal form. Similarly, the change taking place between pre-capitalist and capitalist legality is seen mainly at a quantitative level: ie, in a shift from localised instantiations of the legal form to its universalization.  I think something more than a quantitative shift takes place.  Even at the level of the commodity form itself, there is a qualitative transformation.  In precapitalist, 'simple' circulation, the relationship of commodities to the social division of labour, and thus the commodity relation itself, is completely different.  Many of the inputs of existing commodities have not themselves been commodified; labour has not been generally waged.  The transaction is much more directly determined by political force, or rather by traditional rules, by notions of a 'fair price' arising from religious and political intervention appropriate to feudal social relations, and so it is not necessarily an exchange of equivalents.  In fact, unequal exchange in buying and selling must be considered the norm in pre-capitalist commodity circulation.  The relation of equivalency only seems to operate where the law of value operates; that is, where exchange value understood as the amount of socially necessary labour time embodied in a commodity, is operative.  That is, the commodity form only assumes the form of the exchange of equivalents, requiring the abstract legal subjects which we are invited to see as the universal grammar of law, under capitalism.  It is not that certain formal aspects of the exchange - the act of production for exchange, the use of an exchange medium, the juridical iteration of the exchange relationship - don't stay the same.  It is that the formal aspect which is supposed to ground the legal form changes entirely.

This makes it, I maintain, the wrong axis of continuity.  I maintain instead that we must have an account of law that can incorporate pre-capitalist legal forms: theological jurisprudence such as Shari'a, law that is derivative of religious ritual such as Roman law, different forms of customary law, the Hammurabi Code, etc etc.  That is, an account of law that can comprehend forms which are not predicated on an abstract formally equal legal subjects, whose subjects are explicitly hierarchically differentiated, and which are associated with imposition (thesmos) as much as contract (nomos).  It must allow us to encompass the dense networks of legal relations which in precapitalist as in capitalist societies extend well beyond the sphere of commodity circulation and are decidely not equitable relations.  Such an approach will of necessity not permit the conclusion that bourgeois standards of equality are embedded in the legal form itself at its most abstract level, in its 'timeless structures'.  The legal relation is only infrequently in history one between equal subjects or between equal rights, and then only in a certain abstract manner relating to certain social classifications (citizenship).  Far more pervasively, it is a relation between unequal subjects - not just unequal individuals but corporate subjects, states, and so on - unequally endowed with rights and obligations. 

The solution as I see it is to return to the concept of law as ideology; that is, as a particular element in a mode of production that is proper to the ideological superstructure.  Since the different levels and elements are always-already mutually articulated, their specific form and content (including the appearance of the 'relative independence', as per Franz Neumann, of the legal order) will depend on their articulation in a mode of production and the site of its realization, the social formation.  But that still leaves wide open the question of what kind of ideology it is, and why it takes form it does.  I have cited Althusser's claim that ideology comprises "material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals".  If one thinks of the actions of the police officer, the practices of the police bureaucracy, the rituals of the justice system (naturally, my mind gravitates toward HUAC, SISS, and other instances of ritualised repression, but arguably ritual governs the whole field), the action of the law does seem to conform to this characterization.  Of course, for Althusser, the materiality of ideology was inseparably coextensive with the materiality of the state: hence, ideological-state apparatuses.  So, it would seem appropriate to talk about the state.  To be frank, we cannot talk about law any longer without somehow referring it back to the state's constitutive action.

There is a misplaced concreteness that is invested in the state (including by Pashukanis), in which its materiality inheres in a machinery or instrument of domination.  But this spurious institutional determinacy, based on the 'public' kernel of prisons, armed men, etc., will not hold. The state spreads itself over a much wider field than this, and constitutes areas of life that are supposedly 'private' (in part through the very public-private binary that it sustains). The materiality of the state resides in the relations of forces that it condenses in its institutional sites of power and, through its practices, its action at various levels of the social formation.  Part of this action takes the form of symbolic production, moral regulation, the production of social classifications and, as a corollary, the punishment of symbolic and moral trespass, the disruption of its classifications, etc.  This means that violence is immanent to its action, whether or not violence is immediately deployed.  And it is in this sense that I argue that law occupies the position of an ideological relation within the state's strategic field.  It is in this sense that legality appears as both at one and the same time the dominant mode of legitimacy, of consensus, and the mode in which terror and repression is constantly brought to bear in shaping the social body.   

This brings me to my first attempt to say something definitive about law: Law is the dominant form of the dominant ideology concretized in practices which are permanently inscribed with political violence.  In saying this, I do not mean that the dominant ideology or the legitimacy of the law is simply uncontested.  Nor do I mean that the dominant ideology is just the ideology of a single class, and that therefore law is nothing but the execution of the 'will' or interests of that class.  Rather, it is through contestation and class struggle that the dominant ideology reproduces itself, not as a homogenous ideal substance but as a necessarily heterogenous formation comprising elements of popular ideology which have been absorbed and their oppositional character neutralised.  Poulantzas, strongly influenced by Gramsci, incorporated this into his theoretical architecture more successfully than Althusser.  To this extent, following Poulantzas, we can say that law is a juridical condensation of the relations of forces in the social formation that it rules.

But there is a peculiar characteristic of law as ideology, which is its imperative, axiological-deductive character.  Whether the law's application is 'deduced' from a civil code, a constitution, or from a body of 'common law', it takes the form of a chain of juridical logic, the unfolding of a set of determinations from a body of axioms and norms.  This is nothing other than a rationalized, predictable structure of domination and decision-making within the field of the state.  This rationalization is something that emerges from the double freeing of workers from the means of production, the social division of labour arising from this and the operation of the law of value as a homogenizing dynamic.  Its imperative aspect is accounted for by the immanence of political violence to its actualization.  Law in this sense is a mode of disciplinary power, an articulation of the dominant ideology (within a capitalist mode of production) with the political violence which secures its dominance. 

This brings me back to the question of formal equality.  I have said that law is usually not a relation between equal rights.  But the appearance of formal equality is not a bagatelle, not an optical illusion.  Rather, it does appear at different times in the sphere of legality, in certain forms of legal subjectivity.  Citizens are formally equal, even if capitalists and workers are not.  But it seems to me that this arises from the action of the political first and the legal second.  In terms of the formal equality prevalent in bourgeois democracy, it arises from a type of individualization created by the capitalist state.  The Pashukanis school argues that formal equality between empirically different individuals is strictly homologous with the formal equivalence between qualitatively different commodities.  In effect, (meaning, tendentiously put), the formal equality of individuals in law is a kind of exchange value of the subject.  But I think this takes for granted the individualization that it describes, and which forms the basis for the legal relation.

Either one must assume that the individuals thus mentioned are understood as 'biological' individuals (which I certainly think is implicit in Pashukanis, but is problematic because the existence of such individuals can in no way be just assumed), or the process of individualization must be assumed to have taken place through the commodity relationship itself (which I think is problematic because the relation between traders doesn't have to be a relation between individuals), or it must be something that emerges from the freeing of productive agents from territorial-personal bonds and the rupturing of the chains of signification cementing agents within that bondage. If it is the latter, as Poulantzas argues (I think convincingly), then this crucial link in the grammar of law is established by means of an effect of isolation which has roots in the atomization of productive agents in the capitalist division of labour, and is iterated at a juridico-political level by the capitalist state.  Thus, a capitalist type of individuality is produced.  And in the sense that individual subjects thus produced, juridico-political citizens, are all equally subject to the rule of law, formal equality prevails.  This is also simultaneously a totalising mechanism, inasmuch as these are subjects to the extent that they are incorporated within a national body, within the rule of law as such.

With this capitalist division of labour, the double freeing of labour from means of production, the replacement of tribute with the homogenisation of labour processes into abstract labour-time, comes a simultaneous granulation of social space into an imperfectly homogenised grid of locations (sites of production and consumption, as well as extended reproduction) in contrast with land-as-sovereign-body. The organization of production for surplus value entails rationalization, the bureaucratic standardization of units of space-time, the individualization and isolation of agents as competitive producers, the administration of production relations and thus of class antagonisms along scientific-rational and predictable lines. It entails the organization of political violence according to a system of rationalized axioms.  I think this accounts for the main chracteristics of law in its capitalist form.

This brings me back to the arguments from Thompson and Taylor which I was disputing at the start.  For they both correctly argue that the law is not just an instrument, but is also a field of contestation.  Yet they conclude from this that the law has a legitimate function which is the mediation of power, the suppression of violence, the containment of anti-social actions and so on.  What this misses is that law has this role only inasmuch as it is a mode of class domination: it only mediates class power inasmuch as it reproduces class power through its action; it only suppresses violence inasmuch as it is the organization of violence monopolized by the capitalist state; it only contains anti-social action in as much as the state defines, through the law, what is anti-social.  I said Thompson and Taylor don't fully break with the instrumentalist account of law and the state that they seem to reject, and this is true to the extent that their evaluations imply that the same apparatus can be inhabited and put to use by one or other class in support of any political objective; that any seeming structural selectivity is due to a misuse of the instrument which can be put right by proper use.  They also both greatly over-estimate and misunderstand the role of formal equity in the law.  It is not a promise that law makes, but which goes unrealised due to the distorting role of class power.  Rather, it is a juridico-political form which really does exist and is realised within the capitalist mode of production precisely as a mode in which the political and ideological dominance of the ruling class is secured.  That it is also the form in which this domination is provisionally and partially contested does not change this fundamental relationship.  To do away with class power is not to free law from its shackles and distortions, but to do away with law as such.