On the State as a political Form of Society
by Werner Bonefeld
pp. 26-37 Issue 18 (9,2) – July-December 2022 ISSN (online): 2539/2239 ISSN (print): 2389-8232 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14718/SoftPower.2022.9.2.2
Abstract
This article exposes the political form approach developed in the context of the New Left of 1968, particularly during the 1970s in the former West Germany and the UK. It developed as a critique of the state fetishism of both social democracy and Leninism. The form approach conceives of the capitalist state as the political form of definite social relations. It treats the separation of economy and state as distinct spheres, as socially constituted. As the collective expression of bourgeois society, the state is neither a property of a class nor a neutral or independent power. Rather, like the commodity form, it is a form of historically definite social relations. While the commodity form is the economic form of capitalist society, the state is its political form. The state is a field for social struggle and reform, and the more this struggle civilizes the conduct of government and achieves benefits for the dispossessed producers of surplus value the better. However, the state is not an instance outside capital, because the conceptuality of both state and capital is founded on the existence of a class of dispossessed surplus value producers, which is the one precondition for the existence of the capitalist social relation.